Anxiety, obsessive, trauma, somatic and dissociative disorders

Anxiety disorders are the most common group:

• Generalised anxiety disorder: long-lasting, vague fears not tied to anything specific, with hypervigilance (constantly scanning for danger), restlessness and muscle tension.
• Panic disorder: recurrent, sudden attacks of intense terror, with a pounding heart, breathlessness and fear of dying.
• Phobias: irrational fears of specific things. Specific phobias (snakes, heights), social phobia (fear of being judged by others), and agoraphobia (fear of unfamiliar or crowded places).
• Separation anxiety disorder: in children, intense fear of being separated from parents.

Obsessive-compulsive and related disorders:

• Obsessions: thoughts the person cannot stop, like fears of germs.
• Compulsions: acts repeated again and again to reduce anxiety, like washing hands or checking locks.
• Related: hoarding, hair-pulling and skin-picking disorders.

Trauma- and stressor-related disorders:

• Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): after a traumatic event, the person has flashbacks and nightmares, emotional numbing, and avoids reminders.
• Adjustment disorders and acute stress disorder.

Somatic symptom and related disorders: psychological problems shown as bodily symptoms.

• Somatic symptom disorder: the person is preoccupied with real physical symptoms (like pain) and worries about them excessively.
• Illness anxiety disorder: the person worries about having a serious illness, with few or no symptoms.
• Conversion disorder: loss of a body function (paralysis, blindness) with no physical cause, often after stress.

Dissociative disorders: a split in consciousness, memory or identity.

• Dissociative amnesia (sometimes with fugue: wandering away and forgetting one's identity).
• Dissociative identity disorder, earlier called multiple personality: two or more distinct personalities in one person. (This is not the same as schizophrenia.)
• Depersonalisation/derealisation: feeling detached from oneself or the world.