Whats the cure?

[[Ja...]]

Just watched the latest Intervention, and sure enough, the guy is diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder. It hits home to say the least, and is upsetting, because, well, there is no cure for it, and managing it may or may not be better than just drinking or drugging yourself into oblivion, I am still not sure.

 

I am not an MD or PhD, but it seems to me that for someone unlucky enough to be born with a compromised GABA/Glutamate subsystem, the best chances come from a) the level of dysfunction to be low; and b) to have extremely positive and constructive childhood. You don't have much choice on the first point, and on the second, the odds are stacked against you from the start.

 

Young people who have kids don't realize that just about every action and word that the child is exposed to will become a part of him or her. Even parents who go out of their way to create a positive environment cant help but to create a stressful scenario every now and then. And that's for a healthy child.

 

Take a kid who is predisposed to anxiety, and acts out accordingly, and you have parents who react to that behavior. And, we are having this discussion in 2012 in the west, but what about those of us born 20, 30 40 and so on years ago, and not in the west, where people were not as sensitive to these issues of psychology, and younger still when having kids.

 

Then take into account that even now any attempt at managing anxiety through pharmacological intervention is at best a shotgun approach, and more often than not, its a TNT approach. Most relevant and potent psychoactive medication will create as many problems as it fixes, if not more. And if it doesn't, it is probably not sufficiently helpful to begin with (although partial relief with no side effects would be a miracle).

 

So a person with strong organic anxiety is left to spend every waking moment attempting to manage it, in an effort to one day become so accustomed to this never ending effort, so as to stop noticing it, and thereby achieve some illusion of anxiety-free existence, if only to a point. But at least this person will have a long and toxicity-free life (outside the flood of stress hormones and excitotoxicity, anyway). I am just not sure if that is better than a shorter life, but one free from anxiety.