Psy 270 Week 1 Case Study Of Generalized Anxiety Disorder

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Generalized Anxiety Disorder is described as constant worrying about money, life stressors, relationships, family and work. When an individual is diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder they have been feeling at least three of the six symptoms for 6 months. Some of the symptoms include; Being irritable, lack of sleep, constant ruminating thoughts, restlessness, not being able to concentrate, shaking and trembling. Individuals that have Generalized Anxiety disorder are often anticipating the worst case scenario when it comes to events and they will have tension on matters that may not be as worry some. “GAD affects 6.8 million adults, or 3.1% of the U.S. population, in any given year. Women are twice as likely to be affected” (Adaa.org, …show more content…

This form of therapy is favored by the international consensus group on Depression and Anxiety. There are medications for Anxiety which will help short-term but CBT will help the client uncover where the stress and worrying is stemming from and how to overcome this. Therapy will teach the client coping skills on relaxation for when faced with a stressful trigger. Counselors help their clients learn what may be causing them these symptoms and the client then also sees how anxiety is linked to behavioral, physical, cognitive and psychological issues. Once the client can learn to manage their anxiety then they can start to reduce the tension and worrying by using skills derived from counseling (Kaczkurkin, & Foa, …show more content…

Some things that may occur to the client are having ruminating thoughts about money/life/family, another may be not being able to concentrate on the task at hand, constantly thinking about the same situation continuously, and negatively seeing the worst case scenario. The first intervention would be addressing any cognitive distortions and thoughts that the client may have that leads to having anxious consequences. Then assessing if these are true and if there is evidence to these maladaptive thoughts. The next way to cancel out this negative cognition would be to have the client look at the situation from a different perspective that they may have not noticed before. Then ultimately having the client see the evidence behind the maladaptive thought have the client cancel out the negative thought with the evidence that was shown to them on their own and replacing it with a thought based on something that may have happened in the past instead. Finally, when the thought is set in the clients mind the counselor would ask what the worst possible outcome would have to be if this thought happened and how possible is it? The counselor would need to ask what coping skills would the client use and then hopefully the client may start beginning to prepare to think more rationally about the situation (Smith,Segal & Segal,