Social Anxiety Disorder is also known as social phobia. It is a psychological condition, in which the affected individual exhibits extreme emotional distress, dread, reluctance and endless worry regarding social and performing situations and being judged by others. This disorder develops in early childhood and individuals affected by this disorder often come across as shy, dejected, timid, distressed and highly temperamental. They lack self confidence and the ability to face a crowd alone. Extreme social anxiety can be crippling to the extent of interrupting one’s normal daily functioning. It is estimated that approximately 13.3 per cent of the general population may meet the criteria for this disorder at some point of time and it tends to affect more females than males.

Types of Social Anxiety Disorder:

Social anxiety disorder revolves around the extreme fear of negative evaluation by others. This can be the outcome of unpleasant experiences of the past such as harsh evaluation by teachers, parents or peers. There are two subtypes of this disorder — specific and generalized.

Specific social anxiety: Individuals suffering from this sub-type of social anxiety disorder have enfeebling fears of one or more discrete social situation in which they dread they might be prone to criticism of others and may end up acting in an embarrassing manner. These individuals usually fear public speaking, urinating in a public bathroom or eating or writing in public. All such situations are either avoided by these individuals or they continue with them with great anguish.

Generalized social anxiety: Individuals with this type of social anxiety disorder have an extreme fear of most social situations including both public performance situations and situations requiring social interactions. They often share a diagnosis of avoidant personality disorder.

Diagnosis:

An individual is diagnosed withsocial anxiety disorder if the social situations are not inevitably avoided but are endured with great distress. Some of the features of social anxiety disorder are:

This disorder begins to develop in adolescence or early adulthood.

Individuals with this disorder experience excessive, constant and crippling social anxiety and their day to day functioning is often disrupted.

These individuals constantly look for signs of disapproval from others.

They are constantly hounded by the fear of negative judgment from others.

They tend to avoid all social situations or continue to participate with great distress.

Comorbidity with other disorders:

It is estimated that more than half of the individualswith social anxiety disorder are prone to developing one or more other anxiety disorders such as panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, depression, alcohol abuse, specific phobias or post traumatic stress disorder.