Anxiety and Social Factors
Anxiety and Social Factors
Issue 49 – March 2017
Author: Bob Diamond (robert.diamond@nottshc.nhs.uk)
Key points
- Anxiety, along with other mental health difficulties, are frequently caused by traumas in earlier life and socio-economic difficulties, such as poverty, poor housing and living in impoverished environments.
- Anxiety appears to be on the increase in the Western world and this increase may well be influenced by the mismatch between social expectations on how we ought to live and the reality that we confront.
- Increased anxiety typically leads to an increase in arousal and awareness. Responses to heightened anxiety include, fight, flight and freezing (passivity, submission).