Social Phobia (Social Anxiety Disorder)

Help for Anxiety, Phobias, OCD and Depression

Intense Fear and Panic Over Being Judged/Attacked By Other People

With social anxiety disorder we fear situations where we have to do things in front of others and there is the possibility that they may judge, ridicule or reject us. It's not about being a bit shy or a bit embarrassed about it or that we feel apprehensive about doing things in front of others, it's that we are panic-stricken.

Anxiety:
"A state of uneasiness or tension caused by apprehension of possible misfortune, danger etc."

And to be anxious is to be "worried and tense."

Phobia:
"An abnormal, intense and irrational fear of a given situation, organism or object."

(The Collins English Dictionary)

Anxiety
Nervousness, Anxiety, Panic
Phobias
Shyness

Books:
Help for Anxiety Books

Free Anxiety eBooks

More Resources:
SocialPhobia.org
ADAA (US)

.	Indeed, we can often feel as scared about doing some task in front of other people as if we were going to face a firing squad. Social anxiety disorder is also known as social phobia and like all phobias it involves anticipatory anxiety, fear and panic when facing the object or situation that scares us. Imagine someone who has a phobia of spiders and panics whenever they have to face one. Replace the spider with people and having to face them or do things in front of them. This is what it feels like to have social anxiety disorder. Rooted in the deep and real instinctual fears of our primitive ancestors where a fear of strangers was necessary for survival (for they may attack us, steal from us or kill us) and rejection from the tribe could lead to isolation and death, the main focus of modern day social anxiety disorder is rejection. The current worldview of social phobia is based on the medical model, which views such problems as mental illnesses, 'disordered behaviour', caused by something going wrong in the brain and the answer lies in 'fixing' the thing that has gone wrong – often with medication. However... Take the man in his early twenties, riddled with anxiety, whose father constantly put him down and criticized him with such venom as a child that he's now petrified others will do the same. Is his social phobic behaviour really dis-ordered and irrational? Or is there a better explanation? And a better solution?	.
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