Can anxiety be a genetic disorder being inheritted from parents?!


Question:

Can anxiety be a genetic disorder being inheritted from parents?


Answers:

That's a really good question. Current Psychological thinking is that there probably is a genetic influence - i.e. that a person may inherit the tendency to anxiety from his/her parents. But this doesn't necessarily mean that the individual is definitely going to develop clinical anxiety disorders such as phobias, obsessive-compulsive behaviours etc. for that to happen the individual must also experience certain environmental factors - either treatment by others, situations that are anxiety provoking, or behaviours on the part of others that promote the so-called precipitation (occurence) of the disorder and may also be a perpetuating factor (factors that makes the disorder continue).... For example, a child may inherit a tendency to anxiety, but only develop a phobia or other disorder because there's someont in his/her life who has the disorder or some sort of experience leads to it. This is called the Diathesis-Stress model of mental disorders and accounts for the observation that identical twins don't have 100% co-occurrence (concordance) of such disorders, nor do children of people with officially recognised anxiety disorders inevitably develop similar disorders. There's one last thing to say here: From an evolutionary perspective anxiety can be a bonus; it is the tendency to learn from traumatic experiences that may save lives. Kids who burn their hands on a hot plate one day are very unlikely to want to mess with the hot plate again - their anxiety about being burnt will stop them from doing so. Anxiety can lead a person to run from something that is potentially dangerous, rather than try to confront it. Of course there are times when this avoidance behaviour becomes counterproductive, when it reinforces thinking and acting patterns that merely strengthen one's anxious, negative and avoidant 'take' on an issue, making us even more anxious.
OK: after all that, to summarise: Anxiety disorders might well have a genetic component, but the main influence is probably social: How our immediate family, friends and society function, and what we are taught by what is said around us, are very material in whether and to what extent we may develop an anxiety disorder.




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