Positive Interventions in Anxiety Disorders

Anxiety disorders, as the most common psychiatric condition (Kessler et al., Arch Gen Psychiatry 62:593-602, 2005), pose a significant public health problem. Through our current disease model approach, while we have been studying weaknesses and problems causing anxiety disorders, we do not fully understand the biopsychosocial strengths that shield people from or help them overcome anxiety disorders. While clinicians are trained to elicit the predisposing, precipitating, and perpetuating factors at length, we still need to explore protective factors in more depth. Instead of limiting to the disease model, Positive Psychiatry broadens the scope to the health promotion model. Clinicians need to formulate the patient’s inherent strengths in far more detail and utilize the patients’ drive to face their fears and facilitate the use of those strengths to enhance their resilience. Treatment plans need to include goals to improve the positive psychological traits, including courage, optimism, positive emotions, positive appraisal, positive selective attention, positive internal coping skills, problem-solving skills, humor, resilience, emotional control/regulation skills, and willingness to approach fears instead of avoidance. Positive psychiatry includes direct work on improving family dynamics and social support. There is a lack of Positive Psychiatry research on anxiety disorders. Surprisingly, one finds more on these positive psychosocial traits in pop culture and self-help books than in psychiatric literature. In this chapter, we review the historical background and our current biopsychosocial understanding of anxiety disorders. Then we discuss the ways to add positive psychiatry approach to our pre-existing tools to effectively treat anxiety disorders.