subject: Different Techniques For Social Anxiety Disorder Treatment [print this page] The medical definition for social phobia describes this anxiety disorder as the fear either of interacting with people, or of interacting and being judged negatively by those people and looking foolish in front of them. The effects of this disorder in a person's life run the gamut from social paralysis to heart palpitations to outright panic attacks. It's important to understand the nature of this problem before you can begin to assess what might be the best social anxiety disorder treatments. Those can range from medications to various kinds of psychotherapy.
Some of the standard social anxiety disorder treatments involve various types of medications. For example, a doctor's first prescription for these social fears is usually one of the drugs from the family of medications known as the SSRIs (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors). These include antidepressants like Paxil, Prozac, Zoloft or Celexa. They help to gradually alleviate the symptoms of social phobias, and most often don't produce difficult side effects.
Cognitive therapy for social anxiety disorder involves social skills training, where the person learns to use appropriate behaviors in a social situation, which will hopefully decrease their anxiety. Usually, it's used in conjunction with drugs to help tone down the anxiety responses while the cognitive work is underway.
Given that there is often a traumatic element in the past of someone with these social phobias, it's not surprising that some social anxiety disorder treatments recommend delving into any potential underlying causes of the disorder. This is often done in conjunction with the other treatments such as the medications. While the external symptoms are being brought under control, the possible root causes are being explored.
Someone with this sort of disorder might be successfully treated with just one sort of approach, but the chances are good that they'll do better with a cognitive or psychoanalytic treatment, as well as the medications.
