Anxiety disorders represent a worldwide health burden of unimaginable scope.
For all age ranges, anxiety disorders rank behind only depressive disorders in their impact on human health and wellness. While most anxiety disorder presentations are mild to moderate, and responsive to well-established pharmaco- and psychotherapeutic approaches, sustained remission is more elusive, with most anxiety disorders running a chronic, relapsing-remitting course.
Anxiety disorders at the higher end of the severity spectrum, while representing a minority of all anxiety cases, are still common enough that all experienced clinicians have encountered them, at one point or another. These severe anxiety disorders cause profound human suffering and functional impairment, as well as present a clinical challenge that, by and large, is not adequately remediated by guidelines meant to address the more common, middle-of-the-road anxiety pictures.