patiodog wrote:The wife was in therapy for something that sounds very similar. He medicated and did little else, with no lasting improvement. (Her problems likely run back, in part, to a very dodgy childhood and neurotic parents, though -- the ol' nature v. nurture conundrum.) Granted, both of us were very pharmacologically diverse at the time.
Medication, without at least education, for anxiety is, in my view, clinically incompetent.
Traumatic childhoods can have the lasting effect of lowering the threshold for neurological arousal, and poor parenting is not only traumatic in itself, but often fails to provide the right environment for the developing infant to learn self-soothing (because proper external soothing does not occur often enough).
Tricky physical/environmental stuff indeed!
Thing is, one can come at it from both ends, as it were.
Sometimes, medication allows therapy. Therapy can affect physiology.
And no - I am certainly not a "therapy fixes everything" person, Scoates. But CBT for anxiety is so well demonstrated, that neglecting it is foolish.
I do, however trust that you are not ignorant on the subject, but there are two appropriate view points, I believe.
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