Dimensions
Anxiety
- is ubiquitous. We all feel it, sense it and get driven by it.
- can be useful. It can help focus our attention, energy and motivation.
- is a mood. It can be normal or abnormal, physiological or pathological.
- is a process.
- is a state.
- is not a thing.
- makes senses acute. It makes us aware of our inner conflicts, of intentions, wishes, ambitions, aspirations and weaknesses too.
- relates to the future… to the past too. It is not of the present though it can have repercussions on the present.
- creates a barrier; in thinking rightly…in acting rightly.
- can’t be solved through thinking; thinking itself generates anxiety.
- is unpleasant. It can be realistic or perceived.
- torments. It can be distressing; it can be overwhelming. It just sweeps.
- can make one a mute spectator, a helpless victim.
- is powerful;, powerful enough to destroy.
- springs from the personality. It affects personality as a whole.
- is not an isolated emotion; it is inseparably linked to the indivisible wholeness of the individual.
- is an admission of weakness and insecurity.
- results when individual is confronted with tasks and responsibilities that are beyond his capacity; hence, anxiety actually represents inferiority.
- characterized by cognitive, somatic, emotional and behavioral components.
- may take all forms and intensities, for it is a human being’s basic reaction to a danger to his existence, or to some value he identifies with his existence.
- represents a danger or threat within the individual rather than an external danger.
- When a person suffers from anxiety continuously over a period of time, he lays his body open to psycho-somatic illness.
- In its full-blown intensity, anxiety is the most painful emotion to which human animal is heir.
- We are living in the ‘age of anxiety’ and we need to define anxiety in its totality.
Some terms and differentiation
In order to select an appropriate rubric, it is necessary to know the real meaning of the terms.
- Anguish is an amplified scale of anxiety; it relates more to ‘suffering’ state
- Fright is a sudden fear; a kind of violent terror; alarm.
- Panic is sudden, uncontrollable fear, often causing wildly unthinkable behavior. Panic shuts us down; it is debilitating and renders us ineffective and unresponsive. For the diagnosis of panic disorder, phobias need not be associated.
- Worry and Anxiety: Worry is related to specific situations, such as examination, party or money problem or taking care of the closed one, while anxiety is a generalized emotional state. Worry comes from an objective problem while anxiety comes from subjective problem.
- Anxiety and Fear: Unlike fear, anxiety doesn't come from present situation, which can be perceived but from some situation the person anticipates. Anxiety is more often stimulated by qualities within the person than by external stimuli. In fear we know what threatens us; fear is a threat to one side of the self. Anxiety involves the total self.
- Phobia: Three words are IMP - extreme, irrational and aversion. It is defined as a persistent fear of an object or situation and a person tries to avoid.
Types
- Generalized anxiety disorder
- Anxiety attacks (Panic disorder)
- Obsessive-compulsive disorder
- Phobia
- Social anxiety disorder
- Post-traumatic stress disorder
If anxiety is severe and constant, search for any underlying psychiatric disorder.
Don’t prescribe only upon the label and type of the disorder.
Homoeopathic approach
Individualization
in homoeopathy is a deeper process of labelling the ‘real’ disorder
that the individual suffers! Only comprehensive interview can bring out
the real sickness of the individual for the sake of treatment.
Research
has confirmed that people with certain personality traits are more
likely to develop anxiety. For example, children who are perfectionist,
easily flustered, lack self-esteem or want to control everything,
develop anxiety during childhood or as adults.
Homoeopathy
firmly believes that it is the personality as a whole that suffers.
Anxiety as an emotion must be studied in its entirety. However, it must
be studied not in isolation, but in association with all other
characters of the personality.
Homeopathic
interview must be comprehensive to bring onto the surface the pervasive
characters of the personality and finer nuances that the personality
expresses; this helps a homoeopath in discrimination.
Miasmatic assessment
Psoric Anxiety
The
psoric response is characterized by hypersensitivity, quickness,
exaggerated emotive responses and suddenness. Mostly anxiety is
circumstantial and even a trifling cause may make a person intensely
anxious. However, return to baseline is quick. The anxiety is of
anticipatory and agitational type and there can be pseudo-intellectual
ideation. He has diverse interests in life. There is much more
involvement and entropy and it is difficult to stop nosing into other’s
affairs. He is talkative and will express readily his anxiety. During
the state of anxiety, he will surface many other emotions too and he may
behave in an impractical way.
Psoric
anxiety, apart from being circumstantial, is related to hoarding
instinct, ego-centricity and selfishness. He focuses more on his
individual gains and if he doesn’t receive them, he becomes anxious. The
anxiety is more of neurotic type in psora. It may be related to some
organ and a person may express some discomfort or sensation in a
particular organ and this can act as a feeder to develop anxiety.
Denial
and desensitization are the two defense mechanisms, which a psoric
subject uses in order to create a buffer – a protective blanket of
emotional insulation.
As
a general, a psoric subject continues his life without interruption and
daily activities are continued well though under stress.
Sycotic Anxiety
Anxiety
is deeper in nature. The sycotic response is typical. The mind gets
pre-occupied with the unpleasant past and there is a strange inability
to find the present meaningful. This leads to brooding and consequent
despondent state. The sycotic miasm is for retention and proliferation
and the sycotic mind amply demonstrates them at the level of emotions.
The characteristics of anxiety are
- about future and pre-occupation with ‘errors’ in the past.
- arises out of fear of guilt resulting from anger, irritability, hatred and violence.
- emanates from feeling of envy, jealousy & suspicion.
- from loss of loved one with resultant brooding, grief, homesickness and sentimentalism.
- with impulsive traits.
- Neurotic type that arises from an unconscious conflict within himself.
The
sycotic subject is driven to disorientation. There is distorted
perception about space and time. The connections become poor. Mind gets
confused. Psychotic anxiety. Anxiety is not only circumstantial. The
belief system is perverted. Conflict between rational and irrational
gets developed and the person becomes dogmatic. The ideas become fixed
and the mind is full with fixities, which make the living of self and
others difficult; as if the life gets driven by strong delusions.
Paranoid states. Obsessive states. Obsessive compulsive neurosis. Not
touching the base line. Anxiety is subject’s constant companion.
Pessimist. Skeptic. As compared with psora, the sycotic subject becomes
more impractical.
In
many sycotic cases you may get rigid ideas about ways to do the
activities. It's a kind of sycotic perfectionism. It means an enforced
rigidity. The purpose is to avoid emotional pain by following ‘ism’.
There is a compulsive need to control everything and situation is
perceived as a challenge. ‘I must win and I can’t face defeat’ is the
attitude. Perfectionism and anxiety go together in sycosis.
Perfectionism is a perpetual flight into an illusory future that can’t
be attained.
Anxiety
is of two types in sycotic miasm - overt and covert. It can be
expressive, even exhibitionist or secretive. In secretive subjects,
there is internalization of emotions. A sycotic subject may keep the
anxiety hidden and this may take the form of impulsive behavior.
Criminal
tendencies get multiplied in a sycotic subject and the anxiety emanates
from crime, lawbreaking, lawlessness, criminality, misconduct,
malpractice, corruption, immorality, sin, wickedness, vice etc. He is
entangled in his wrongdoings and he uses all manipulative techniques to
escape from the situation.
It is interesting to note that Thuja,
a major representative remedy of sycotic miasm, is a good example of
anxiety of sycosis. Even under the rubric, ‘delusion, criminal, that he
is a’, Thuja is mentioned.
Tubercular anxiety
Tubercular
mental state is characterized by hypersensitivity and overactivity.
Anxiety in a tubercular subject is mostly agitational than depressive.
Severe agitation may lead to self-harming behavior such as biting the
lip and scratching or ripping the skin. Agitated people in a tubercular
subject may be combative, screaming or physically lashing out at others.
It
is ‘restless’ anxiety. There are oscillations. He is never quiet and
anxiety drives him in fast motion. It is as if he runs anxiety’. When he
is anxious, he becomes crazy and drives everyone to become crazy. The
discrimination between rational and irrational is lost and the subject
demonstrates impulsive and erratic behavior. This can extend into
destructive behavior. The tubercular subject is here and there and
nowhere and that makes him non-committed in life. This results in
unstable life of unpredictable type, which becomes a source of anxiety.
The resources become poor-of people, of money and of mundane
possessions.
When
the tubercular subject has anxiety at its pick, he becomes very
restless and wandering in search of solace. But as the solace is not
within, it can’t be outside. He may even strangely present cheerfulness
and optimism during the state of anxiety. The behavior can be odd and
misfitting to the situation. I had a patient who will ask for sexual
activity when there will be panic and the wife was asking how a person
can think of sex during panic.
Panic
and phobic reactions are more pronounced in a tubercular subject.
During the panic state, a subject may lose his identity and there may be
depersonalization. He doesn’t understand what he is doing and it can be
a destructive behavior. It can be a case of mania or manic-depressive
psychosis.
Anxiety
can profoundly affect a person’s life and a person is extremely
tolerant and impulsive and can make a destructive act to land in a jail.
Syphilitic anxiety
Irrational
mind overpowers rational mind in a syphilitic subject. The mind becomes
perverted. There is poverty at the level of discrimination. Loss of
values in life is the chief theme of a syphilitic miasmatic subject.
Life has no any mission and the person becomes a prey to
pleasure-seeking impulses. Over-indulgence in criminality, sex,
gambling, alcohol, narcotics and other addictions associated with
heedlessness bring onto to the fore anxiety as a perverted emotion.
Narcissism and gratification of the body are at the center in life.
Syphilitic subject’s sinful behavior is chiefly responsible for anxiety
state. He himself lands into trouble and doesn’t take any feedback from
his blunders.
Anxiety
in syphilitic miasm is never represented as an isolated emotion and it
is associated with extreme depression and despair leading to suicidal
disposition. It is also associated with anger, hatred, violence etc.
leading to destruction of objects, persons and self. Anxiety affects the
mind in a profound way leading to paralysis of will, which adds to the
state of despair.
Due to disorganization of mind, psychotic anxiety is present and a person is dispersed at large, resulting in incoordination.
The
subject chases the materialistic gains in a perverted way. The mind
becomes fanatic and is after misdirected journey in life. Anxiety
becomes perpetual, to cause more despair and more wrongdoings.
What has been described in a tubercular subject is equally present, rather in a more deep and perverted way.
