The only way to overcome anxiety is through exposure

So there is only one type of anxiety? Only those who need some type of intervention can have an opinion?

Plenty of us have said we faced it and managed to mask. To this day I find myself almost copying or thinking what would my friend say and do in this situation? I’d be described as loud and wanting to be the centre of attention. Annoying at times I’m sure! Im happy with that. I’d hate to be viewed as quiet, anxious and worst of all, wouldn’t say boo to a goose!

I agree with you OP. Anxiety is a symptom and not a diagnosis and yet it is regularly bandied around as though it was a diagnosis in itself these days.

An SSRI and CBT are the evidence based treatments for many anxiety disorders and work best in combination. These are available from your GP and self referral to NHS TT. If they don’t work’ it is often because people are not following through on the graded exposure or behavioural experiments.
PTSD is a different matter and requires different treatment but social phobia, agoraphobia and GAD respond to the above treatment an are most of the people who ‘have anxiety’ You don’t need endless long term dependency promoting therapy either you just need to learn CBT strategies and put them into practice. Even computerised or book based CBT has been shown to work in clinical trials.

Avoidance is the worst thing you can do for anxiety as it powerfully maintains it. Over time it will then generalise to other similar situations and get worse. Avoidance feels like the right thing in the moment because confronting anxiety is very painful and difficult but if you aspire to be free of it that’s what is needed.

I am not in any way saying that it is easy at all because it isn’t it’s very very hard and some people are much more predisposed to anxiety than others because of biology and life experiences but the vast majority of people can be helped with an SSRI and CBT and avoidance is very definitely the wrong way to go.

I don’t think you can point to a single ‘reason’.

We all encounter anxious feeling every day, that is normal. Most of the time it doesn’t escalate to pathological levels because we have enough resilience to overcome the feeling. Resilience isn’t ‘inner grit’, it’s things like a friends and family who we know have our back, feeling safe and like we belong in our community, financial security, job security, housing security, time to unwind and have fun each day, sufficient sleep. Secure attachments for children (with adults who don’t look at screens instead of at them), and school environments that are calm and safe and where they know all the adults there (rather than chaotic and unpredictable surrounded by strangers).

For sooo many reasons in today’s society (which I could get political
about, but I won’t), people are lacking the factors in their lives that will help them to be resilient, and have been for decades. Persistent anxiety (and other MH conditions) can and do get a grip on them and they find it very hard to break free with all the additional stresses that are on them.

She absolutely is and ignorant to boot as the professionals on here have highlighted.

Also, things like fear of the dentist or spiders etc are called Specific Phobias. Overcoming a specific phobia is completely different to overcoming panic disorder/ social phobias/ GAD etc.
There is a whole branch of medicine that treats these things. For anyone that hasn’t heard of it, it’s called Psychiatry/ Clinical Psychology. And unless you’re qualified to make statements about how different treatments work, you’re talking out of your arse.

Being anxious to the extent you self harm and try to kill yourself isn’t natural or something you can just work through.

Check your ignorance.

I agree with you OP, and I speak as someone who has been diagnosed as suffering with anxiety. So many people think being nervous about every day activities is the same as anxiety, similar to people thinking being sad is the same as depression. People need to accept being nervous is a natural emotion and they should work through it rather than avoid. Nobody is being taught resilience nowadays.

You also seem to have triggered posters who are being deliberately obtuse.

Lots of posters seem determined to misinterpret the OP. She was clear in her OP that she wasn’t talking about every situation and that she was talking about controlled exposure over time.
She is not being unreasonable.

The lack of treatment at an early stage is a massive issue. When children and young people attempt suicide, self harm or experience rape and abuse and get nothing you know the system is broken.

You are wrong.
Sometimes controlled exposure can work.
Other times increasing stress levels can leads to worsening anxiety or depression.
It is as simple as that.

Well done for overcoming these challenges.

Your title is likely to get some people's backs up. It's clear you see controlled exposure as just one way. If you'd titled your post how you overcame anxiety the response from some who've jumped the gun may have been different.

I think we also need to look at the reasons behind why MH problems are increasing? Especially in younger people. Is it down to the breakdown of society, social media, are more people allowing anxiety to take hold rather than powering through. I’m not saying any of those are correct just that anxiety and mental health issues are spiralling and I think the powers that be need to know why that is so it can be corrected! When we have an obesity epidemic or smoking related illnesses increase there are public health campaigns, who remembers the HIV ones of the 80’s.

I think confronting your fears is fine in principle but it's very simplistic to think that solves things for everybody.

I am mentally danaged from chidhood emotional neglect, have very low self esteem and self worth, bad life experiences and I am Autistic. I've had social anxiety all my life but living alone during COVId isolation has set me back to a place I can't recover from. I've had CBT and seen a Clinical Psychologist and honestly now feel my problems stem from my essential being and no amount of trying to face my fears is going to alter me..

This is really interesting thank you. I was pondering this when thinking about the mismatch between the requirement people are talking about for dedicated long term professional intervention and the incredibly long CAHMS waiting times. And also the fact that with both adult and child services being so underfunded that absolutely have to triage and address the most extreme and life threatening cases first. (I have had experience of trying to get help over a number of years for an adult with severe mental health issues so I have long term exposure to the limits of what is available)

Especially for those that can’t afford private care an investment in your own skills and education in supporting your child seems essential. Young Minds has some good online resource and I’m sure there are many other routes.

There is a sense in the thread that people should just white knuckle it and get on with whatever they are anxious about. Phobias or anxiety can feel huge and not just a little fear they need to talk themselves out of. The key is support and understanding and if more people were open about their phobia or anxiety I suspect we might be surprised by how many people are anxious about something.

And the reason for that is MH provision is broken. Children and young people are not getting the treatment and care they need so treatable conditions become severe and hard to treat conditions. Hence the bottle neck from CAMHs to CMHT. It’s madness and a false economy.

Not anxiety. Why have some people got this stupid idea? People used to know what anxiety was in a medical sense.

I was the victim of a similar crime 25 years ago (very violent stranger rape, tried to kill me and would have succeeded had he not been disturbed).

I had months of therapy at the Maudsley trauma unit, and it did indeed consist of going over what had happened very slowly and in detail, stopping immediately I felt any panic, working up to visiting the site (which happened 4 months into treatment and took several attempts - passing through the nearest station, getting off at the station, going outside the station entrance, going to the end of the road it happened on, etc etc). So, gradual, managed exposure. My starting position was being unable to leave the house unaccompanied (this was over a year after the rape), and having a panic attack if I had to think about it (I couldn’t even complete the pre-therapy assessment forms myself because I was crying too much).

Of course I still find discussions about rape triggering, depictions of rape on tv triggering, etc. and I don’t exactly hang around the place it happened. But I no longer have severe PTSD.

Incidentally the rape crisis counselling was worse than useless - the Maudsley therapy was specifically focused on treating PTSD symptoms not rape in particular. It would obviously not be sensible to DIY it, but I don’t think OP was talking about people with severe PTSD so much as mild anxiety.

@Passaggressfedup I suspect you won't return to this thread

But I feel like you're working with some Disney version of anxiety

I've had such dreadful anxiety over the years, I've had to go to work to pay the bills but the anxiety is still debilitating - I got off the bus to work because I was so anxious I thought I was gonna throw up, I got back on the bus because how else do the bills get paid? It's exhausting. And in many periods of life, it happened every day.

Anxiety isn't necessarily a fear of something in particular - some of us are just anxious.

Therefore, you can't use exposure therapy to get better from it

You don't really understand what it is in a clinical sense

And I don't think you understand that some of us are stuck with it permanently

I am still able to go out and work, but they are a huge number of things that I can't do because I have to recover from all the effort trying to manage the anxiety to go to work

Does that make sense? So I end up living a very small life.

If someone tells me to get over my anxiety over something that I don't have to do - fuck no. There aren't enough hours in the day to manage that.

By the way, I don't have help from the state or anything. No benefits or anything like that I mean although yes, I have had medication from the NHS for decades. They're putting the lid on that I can tell you that now.

So me being anxious doesn't affect anyone except me

I don't really know where you were going with this thread - if you don't know anything about it, that's fine. I don't bother learning about medical conditions that I don't currently have. Again, that would take all bloody day.

But why did you feel the need to start a thread? I don't get it.

i'm a big fan of not commenting when I don't know anything about a subject.

Or else questions in order to learn more

I don't start mad threads that are bound to upset people. You can see from the responses you've had here, there are many many types of anxiety that are not going to respond to "exposure"therapy

The Baz Lurman song Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen) has the line 'Do one thing everyday that scares you'. When I'm having a moment or procrastinating about doing something anxiety inducing I remember that line and think 'This is that one thing today' and do it.

Often, that's the catalyst for doing other scary things because I'm geared up but I tell myself I only have to do the one thing and then I don't have to do anything else. It works for me.

With trauma events the exposure wouldn’t be to the trauma event obviously. But if the trauma related anxiety is impairing somebody’s access to something then exposure to that might help their brain feel safe again. So if somebody was attacked in a park, they may become agoraphobic. Very slow exposure to the outdoors and open spaces could potentially help them overcome their fear of being outdoors.

Nobody is suggesting that they be attacked repeatedly!

@Taztoy - you have taken over OP's thread to the point it isn't what she was talking about any more. I wonder what you want to achieve here? No one here is comparing general, treatable anxiety with severe sexual abuse and PTSD.

YANBU and any decent parent would be encouraging their child out of it instead of indulging and feeding into this ‘oh they can’t possibly because they have anxiety’ narrative.

Parents like this aren’t doing them any favours. You’re setting them up for a lifetime of claiming benefits and hiding away when they could have a chance with real support and encouragement.