2. What Is Anxiety?

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this lecture, we think about anxiety and anxiety disorders, focusing in particular on: (i) defining anxiety as an emotion we experience when we feel under threat or stress; (ii) the symptoms of anxiety, including emotional, cognitive, physical and behavioural aspects; (iii) how we can differentiate between regular feelings of anxiety and an anxiety disorder; (iv) two types of anxiety condition known as generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) and panic disorder.

Course

In this course, Professor Femi Oyebode (University of Birmingham) explores anxiety and anxiety-related disorders. In the first lecture, we think about the general nature of emotions and how we experience them. In the second lecture, we think about anxiety and anxiety disorders more specifically. In the third lecture, we think about phobias, including specific phobia, social phobia and agoraphobia. Next, we think about obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and its relation to anxiety. In the fifth and final lecture, we think about stress-related conditions such as acute stress disorder (ASD), adjustment disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Lecturer

Professor Oyebode is an expert in descriptive and clinical psychopathology. He is an authority on the cognitive neuropsychiatry of delusional misidentification syndromes and on other rare and unusual psychiatric syndromes. He is the author of Sims’ Symptoms in the Mind: textbook of descriptive psychopathology. This is the leading English language text on psychopathology and has been translated into Estonian, Italian, Korean and Portuguese He is also a recognised expert in medical humanities writing about the value of literature to medicine.