Social anxiety is a common illness, but many do not know how to help sufferers

By Amanda Sully

Sitting in her cold car in front of an Applebee’s on a cold Tuesday night in Cleveland, she knew she was about to face one of her biggest fears stepping into a public restaurant all alone. She slowly approached the door of the large brick building, grabbed the cold metal door handle and opened the heavy wooden door. She heard the tall, dark-haired hostess say, “How many this evening?” Normally she would confidently say, “Two” or “Three.” However, today with a cracked, quiet, fearful voice she said, “Just one.” As she walked with the hostess she began to fear that she was silently being judged for the fact she was there alone. She noticed older gentlemen in button-down shirts sitting at the bar alone, avoiding the responsibilities of home, but she was still sensitive about dining there all alone at a table for four, in her nicest hoodie and black legging outfit.

Have you ever run into someone you know in public and, instead of saying hello, they look down and bury their head in their phone? There is a chance that this person may be living with Social Anxiety Disorder. Thomas A. Richards, psychologist and director of the Social Anxiety Institute, says that living with social anxiety is a constant state of fear, apprehension, avoidance and pain. Not many understand, or know, how to help people with this disorder because not only do sufferers crave the attention of those close to them and cling to them, they also want nothing more than to be left alone.

Scott Vrana writes in the Salem Encyclopedia of Health that the term anxiety has become one the most loosely used terms in psychology. Over the past decade anxiety disorders have become the leading mental illness in the United States, making it a big problem for today’s and tomorrow’s population. According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, anxiety disorders affect 40 million adults, 18.1 percent of the population, in the United States every year. Of these, 15 million are living with Social Anxiety Disorder. Even though so many live with this disorder, most Americans, and even some doctors, have never heard of it.

Elizabeth Piskura, a sophomore at Cleveland State University described what it is like living day-to-day with social anxiety. According to Elizabeth, waking up in the morning alone and in a place where she is comfortable is fine. She often wakes up feeling refreshed and ready to face her day. As she drives to school on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, she starts to feel the pressure. She has her schedule worked out in a way that allows her to avoid heavy public pressures. She begins school at 8 a.m. and is only there until noon.

With classes at Cleveland State being larger than the high school classes she attended, sometimes 65 students, she says it is harder to operate and focus as well as she does when she is at home watching her favorite show, “Impractical Jokers,” or at Starbucks studying with her friends. Not only is she trying to make it through her college years, she is also hoping to enter a postgraduate program in medicine to become a physician assistant. She tells me that she is under a lot of pressure to overcome her social anxiety before getting a PA degree and coming in contact with thousands of patients every year.

A study by a team of researchers headed by German neurologist Borwin Bandelow, published in 2004 by the European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, showed a link between people living with social anxiety and traumatic life events that happen early in adolescence. This study found a strong relationship between social anxiety and specific types of trauma at this time of life, such as separation from parents in adolescence, violence or sexual abuse in their families.

Sigmund Freud theorized in 1910 that traumatic events in a person’s life will leave a much larger impact if the event takes place between birth and age 5. The 2004 study published by the European Archives found no clear relationship between social anxiety and traumatic events in the first 15 years of someone’s life. This finding does not disprove Freud’s theory that early traumatic events would not scar someone for life and make them fear social interaction, but it does indicate that events later in life, or a combination of events, could lead to such a mental disorder.

Another study, conducted by a team headed by Michael Otto from the University of New Mexico, explores the childhood histories of those anxiety disorders to find out when anxiety disorders begin to become a part of people’s lives. The study examined whether parental rejection at a young age affected social anxiety in children and in turn, affected the friendly relationships a child makes early in their life. The study found that the quality of family relationships and youth friendships have a strong relationship. Eighty percent of subjects in this study revealed that their social anxiety symptoms began before the age of 18 and were connected to previous family and friendship problems in early childhood.

Recent studies have also found a relationship between a person’s level of social anxiety and how much time they spend on the internet. According to an article from 2016 written by Shechner Passal and coauthors in Computers and Human Behavior, people living with social anxiety tend to use the internet as a form of comfort. For some, the internet has become their sole place to hide and truly be themselves. Some patients with social anxiety even have gone as far as to say that the internet is the only place where they are “truly loved and accepted.” For some this may seem a bit over-dramatic, but for some patients with social anxiety, this has become their sad reality. These patients who believe this kind of feeling can be found on the internet have been known to become internet addicts. They may also begin to view their online interactions as more important than the interactions in front of them.

Charity Smith, professor of abnormal psychology at Cleveland State University, gave a lecture on social anxiety disorder on April 27. During this class, Smith described social anxiety disorder as intense worry and fear related to a social situation. Due to this unnecessary fear, people suffering with this disorder are more likely to have panic attacks when forced into a social situation they are not comfortable with. This fear of social situations can come from one’s fear of humiliation, embarrassment or scrutiny.

Part of the lecture focused on the ability to do something one normally can do in private, but not in public. This can become frustrating for the patient suffering with the disorder. A few common examples of social fears is the ability to urinate in public restrooms, or publicly perform a dance or song. This can lead to another common social phobia called performance anxiety. Although almost everyone suffers with this anxiety, a victim of social anxiety can feel the fear to perform in front of others far more than other people. Stemming from this fear of performing in front of a crowd, someone who is suffering from performance anxiety may also suffer in interpersonal activities, like dating, parties and large group events.

With the growing rate of social anxiety disorder cases in the United States in the past 10 years, it is no secret that further research and discoveries need to take place. Forty million adults in the United States have admitted to suffering with the disorder, and have come out to say that this disorder interferes with their social lives, education, careers and family, according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America. Social anxiety holds back citizens who are otherwise normal from what they want to do.

References

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