suicide attempts as well as incarceration (National Alliance on Mental Illness, 2008).
Clinicians often fail to differentiate between the mood changes that are produced by depressants, stimulants, and opiates and psychological disorders including anxiety disorder and depression. Depressants such as alcohol, and sleeping pills and anti-anxiety drugs decrease autonomic function which means patients present as anxious, suffering from insomnia, a high heart and respiratory rate, and elevated body temperatures (O'Malley, 1997). In the majority of alcohol and drug dependent patients, psychiatric symptoms are almost always temporary and symptoms of substance withdrawal which cause patients to seek treatment are exactly the opposite of the effect produced by the drugs. To make a final differentiation between substance induced morphology and long-term psychiatric disorders, clinicians must evaluate patients for up to six weeks following a period of abstinence (O'Malley, 1997). Dual diagnoses may therefore require treatment of the patient's substance abuse before any meaningful work respect to a comorbid or underlying psychiatric disorder can be attempted. It is difficult to determine whether or not it is the effect of the drugs or alcohol that are causing symptoms or if these symptoms are related to an underlying mental illness.
Anxiety disorders are defined as follows:
The anxiety disorders are a group of mental disturbances characterized by anxiety as a central or core symptom. Although anxiety is a commonplace experience, not everyone who experiences it has an anxiety disorder. Anxiety is associated with a wide range of physical illnesses, medication side effects, and other psychiatric disorders
Anxiety disorders are the "most common form of mental disturbance in the United States population. It is estimated that 28 million people suffer from an anxiety disorder every year (Anxiety Disorders, 2008, p. 1)". ...