title: How normal are anxiety and fear?
abstract: In practice or in research, psychiatrists should confine their work to abnormal or pathological phenomena. To distinguish normality from abnormality, psychiatrists (often implicitly) test people's behaviour against the following criteria: suffering, loss of autonomy and unreality. The positive aspects of anxiety/fear will be discussed: in how far the phenomenon induces pleasure, enhances autonomy or is justified. This approach to the reality aspect is through an ethological focus on a specific form of fear--the fear of strangers in young children. The prevalence of abnormal fear and anxiety in similar populations is shown to be dependent on the way in which (ab)normality is operationalised. A qualitative individual-oriented approach yields considerably less anxiety than a quantitative group-oriented approach. In practice a careful assessment of (ab)normality will help the psychiatrist to treat normal anxiety in an efficient and abnormal anxiety in an effective manner.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Hodiamont
mesh_terms: D001007:Anxiety / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology / Q000628:therapy; D001008:Anxiety Disorders / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000523:psychology / Q000628:therapy; D005239:Fear; D006801:Humans; D010556:Personality Tests / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D012016:Reference Values