Customer Reviews

Chronic Anxiety: Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Mixed Anxiety-Depression

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This book didn't really tell me as much about chronic anxiety as I'd hoped. I got excited by the subtitle (Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Mixed Anxiety-Depression) because the anxiety-depression connection receives too little attention in the literature, but I was disappointed that there wasn't more here.

When I see a chapter titled "The Biology of Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Chronic Anxiety", I expect ... well, whole books could be written on that. Maybe the problem is in the title. The articles skim the surface and leave me frustrated. Of what good, really, is it to know only that "neurotransmitters of potential significance in anxiety disorders include ... (NMDA) receptors and ... (CRF). Selective antagonists of the excitatory NMDA receptors have been shown in animal models to have antiepileptic, muscle relasxant, and anxiolytic properties [reference given]" (p. 65). And then, after some detail on CRF, the chapter leaves off neurotransmitters and moves on to metabolism. The fact that it said neurotransmitters of interest *include* these two implies there are others. WHAT ARE THEY? And the single sentence covering NMDA is too little when a book is written narrative-style like this. Either leave it out or give me a little more substance. As it is, the chapter reads like it can't decide whether to be a narrative or a list of things to memorize for an exam.

I found similar difficulties with other chapters.

I don't mean that there's nothing of value here, just that you'll wind up needing to go to other books and articles anyway, so...? You'd probably run into, for instance, the work on NMDA elsewhere if you just did the literature review yourself. This book doesn't add anything to that.