Anxious : using the brain to understand and treat fear and anxiety

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. The tangled web of anxiety and fear

2. Rethinking the emotional brain

3. Life is dangerous

4. The defensive brain

5. Have we inherited emotional states of mind from our animal ancestors?

6. Let's get physical : the consciousness problem

7. It's personal : how memory affects consciousness

8. Feeling it : emotional consciousness

9. Forty million anxious brains

10. Changing the anxious brain

11. Therapy : lessons from the laboratory

Anxiety is the most prevalent psychiatric problem of our time. Decades of research have gone into probing its mysteries and developing treatments. But what if we've been thinking about fear and anxiety in the wrong way for all these years?This is the groundbreaking premise behind a wave of new research, led by the lab of renowned neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux. He believes that fear and anxiety are not innate states, simply waiting to be unleashed in the brain. Rather they are assembled experiences, and that has huge implications for patients. By mapping brain circuits, LeDoux expla. Joseph LeDoux, whose NYU lab has been at the forefront of research efforts to understand and treat fear and anxiety, explains the range of anxiety disorders, their origins, and discoveries that can restore sufferers to normalcy. Collectively, anxiety disorders are our most prevalent psychiatric problem, affecting about forty million adults in the United States. In Anxious, Joseph LeDoux, whose NYU lab has been at the forefront of research efforts to understand and treat fear and anxiety, explains the range of these disorders, their origins, and discoveries that can restore sufferers to normalcy. LeDoux's groundbreaking premise is that we've been thinking about fear and anxiety in the wrong way. These are not innate states waiting to be unleashed from the brain, but experiences that we assemble cognitively. Treatment of these problems must address both their conscious manifestations and underlying non-conscious processes. While knowledge about how the brain works will help us discover new drugs, LeDoux argues that the greatest breakthroughs may come from using brain research to help reshape psychotherapy. A major work on our most pressing mental health issue, Anxious explains the science behind fear and anxiety disorders.--provided from Amazon.com