Anxiety Disorders: Mental Illness or Normal?

Generalized anxiety disorder, OCD, social anxiety disorder (social phobia), PTSD, panic disorder...The current worldview of these problems is driven by the medical model and the belief that they are (mental) illnesses caused by something going wrong in the brain and that the answer lies in 'fixing' the thing that has gone wrong – often with medication.However...Take Margaret, the lovely middle-aged woman (emotionally fragile from early life stress and conflict) who suffers emotional abuse at the hands of her partner – abuse that not only scares her but also makes her feel that she cannot do anything right, and that everything she does fails miserably or is totally worthless. Is her generalized anxiety disorder simply the result of something going wrong in her brain that can be fixed by medication?What about Gary, in his early twenties, riddled with anxiety, whose father constantly put him down and criticized him with such venom as a child that he's now petrified others will do the same. Is his social phobic behaviour truly dis-ordered and irrational? Or is there a better explanation?'Anxiety Disorders: Mental Illness or Normal?' takes a fresh look at anxiety disorders through the lens of human evolution and survival and reveals how 'trying to protect our self' from an onslaught of negative life experiences can explain the development of many of those anxiety problems classed as 'disorders' and 'mental illness' today