Anxiety disorders and workplace-related anxieties
Introduction
Anxiety disorders are frequent and result in suffering for the patient and costs for the society (Greenberg et al., 1999, Ninan, 2001). Anxiety disorders are a heterogeneous group of disorders including specific phobias, social phobia, agoraphobia and panic disorders, generalized anxiety, OCD, PTSD, hypochondriasis and somatization disorders (ICD-10, World Health Organization (1993); DSM-IV, American Psychiatric Association, 1994).
There is growing evidence that the workplace can have an important role in the development of anxiety problems and disorders. This is discussed under headings like “mobbing”, “work stress”, “burnout”, or “work-load” (Brodsky, 1988; Buddeberg-Fischer, Klaghofer, & Buddeberg, 2005; Greif, Bamberg, & Semmer, 1991; Gusy, 1995, Hasalm et al., 2005; Helge, 2001a, Helge, 2001b; Hobson & Beach, 2000; Kawakami et al., 1996, Kirchner, 1993, Leyman, 1993; Maslach & Jackson, 1981; Rohmert, 1984, Selye, 1983, Turnipseed, 1998; Zapf, Knorz, & Kulla, 1996; Nagata, 2000, Rahe et al., 2002). Special attention has been given to workplace-related posttraumatic stress disorders (Laposa, Alden, & Fullerton, 2003; MacDonald et al., 2003; Price, Monson, Callahan, & Rodriguez, 2006) and anxiety phenomena in special professional settings (Fehm & Schmidt, 2006).
Independent of their nature and origin, anxiety disorders can interfere with the ability of participants to work (Haines, Williams, & Carson, 2002; Linden and Baron, 2005; Linden, Oberle-Thiemann, & Weidner, 2003; Linden and Muschalla, 2005). Work-related anxieties can manifest in the form of phobia, social anxiety, generalized anxiety, fears of insufficiency, or hypochondrial anxiety in relation to work, working conditions, or colleagues and superiors.
Section snippets
Statement of the problem and purpose of the study
To date it is unknown to what degree anxiety disorders and work-related anxiety disorders are interrelated. Do all anxiety disorders also involve the workplace? Are work-related anxieties always a symptom of a primary anxiety disorder? To our knowledge there is no systematic study on the interrelation of anxiety disorders and work-related anxiety disorders. In order to answer these questions we wanted to investigate the relationship between anxiety disorders in general and anxiety exhibited in
Assessment of anxiety disorders and work-related anxiety disorders
All participants were interviewed with the standardized Mini International Psychiatric Interview MINI (Sheehan et al., 1994), based on the diagnostic criteria of the DSM-IV. The interview allows to assess all major psychiatric disorders, including all anxiety disorders.
On the basis of this interview, we developed an additional interview kit for the assessment of work-related anxieties, the “MINI work anxiety interview”. This second interview targeted panic, situational phobia, social phobia
Results
According to the standardized interview, the predominant diagnoses in female participants were depression (44%) and generalized anxiety disorders (50%), and in male participants generalized anxiety disorders (31%), social phobia (31%) and dysthmia (27%). There were 17.4% of participants who were not suffering from other mental problems but, e.g., from migraine or pain disorders. Table 2 shows the prevalence of anxiety disorders in general and other major mental disorders, the prevalence of
Discussion
This study is an investigation on the relationship between anxiety in general and anxiety exhibited in the workplace. Clinical experience shows that disabling anxiety must not always affect all parts of live, but can be related very specifically to the workplace only. Any workplace has features which can provoke anxiety. Workplaces are hierarchically organized so that superiors can exert sanctions, there are demands which can result in failure, there is rivalry between colleagues, there can be
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