불안장애의 위험주제

Themes of Danger in Anxiety Disorders

In order to investigate the presence and the contents of the ideational components of the patients with the anxiety disorders, the authors studied 44 out-and inpatients of anxiety disorders diagnosed by the DSM-1 criteria at the neuropsychiatric department of Pusan National University Hospital. The results obtained were as follows. Forty three subjects out of 44 patients with anxiety disorders reported to recognize the ideational components of the themes of danger associated with anxiety experiences. 79. 5 percent of the subjects had fears of physical disasters； 70.5 percent had psychological and 25 percent, social disasters. Twenty five of them reported two or three themes of danger simultaneously and 18 had themes of either physical or psychological disasters. Particularly there were many who had fear of death and fear of insanity simultaneously. A tendency of more prominent themes of physical disasters was noted in males, cases of acute onset, cases with panic attacks and those with agoraphobia, and that of psychological disasters in females, cases of insidious onset and generalized anxiety disorder. But statistics failed to show significant difference probably due to insufficient numbers of the subjects. Surveying the contents of each theme, physical disasters were represented by fear of dying or death, psychological disasters by fear of insanity and social disasters by interpersonal rejection or social failure. From these results, the authors suggest that 1)themes of danger are consistently recognied by those with anxiety disorders during experiences of anxiety 2) the content and the intensity of the themes of danger have certain relationship with the intensity of anxiety 3) and the content of the themes of danger can be interpreted as the fear of annihilation.