Customer Reviews

Generalized Anxiety Disorder: Advances in Research and Practice

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This is a remarkable book. Even if you have forgotten your undergraduate statistics, despair not. There is plenty in this book that is easily consumed by the non-specialist.

This book is useful to the sufferer in that it so clearly describes the experience of living daily with GAD and explains so specifically the mechanisms that drive anxiety and the development of the disorder. That goes a long way toward helping the sufferer begin to restructure their thinking about their disorder. Instead of seeing it, as they always have, as a major character flaw, they can begin to examine it as a cognitive response that can be retrained through cognitive behavioral therapy; a skill that the client learns that they can take with them through the rest of their life.

A more accessible book for laypeople is "The Anxious Brain," which is written for clinicians and is targeted at treatment. That book is smaller and leaves the expansive details to the citations. It's an excellent reference for both clinicians and clients.

But the book for which this review is written is a marvelous compilation of the latest in the field. Buy it or get it on interlibrary loan. Having gotten mine on loan, I now want to get a copy to refer to again and again.

As a psychologist specializing in treating anxiety, Generalized Anxiety would have to be potentially the hardest to treat as it is so fluid and hard to pin down unlike other anxiety disorders such as specific phobias. The author is regarded as one of the leading experts in the area of anxiety. This book is accademically based so if you are wanting a light read then this may not be for you. Witht that said it's easy to read and is grounded in the latest research for treating GAD. I have found it very useful for working with worriers in my private work. If you like reading about cutting edge research and are feeling frustrated with not being able to help clients who are the typical 'Worry warts' then this book is a must for your library. The author has also written a fantastic book on running 'anxiety groups' for practioners - brilliant.
Anthony Gunn, psychologist and author of Fear Is Power: Turn Your Fears Into Success

Okay, this is tough material and it is for those of us who need to understand what anxiety and worry really are because it is killing us and ruining the quality of our lives even if it does not lead to some sort of crippling depression. Not a light feel good experience.

This book is an assembly of papers presented as chapters. If you choose this book please read a chapter and shelve it for a few days while you ponder what you are learning.

General Anxiety Disorder deconstructed. The rationalist in you can use the tools you can fashion here. I think that understanding what worry is not just what it feels like has been very useful for me. Expect some discomfort here.