Causes of Generalized Anxiety Disorder

Though the symptoms of Generalized anxiety disorder can be marked, it has still been difficult to know the exact causes of generalized anxiety disorder. However, it is observed that generalized anxiety disorder takes place mainly due to a number of long-term predisposing causes such as hereditary causes, childhood circumstances that mainly include parental rejection and abandonment, excessive parental expectations and parents modeling worry behavior. Let us look how each of these contributes to the generalized anxiety disorder.

Long term Predisposing Causes of Generalized Anxiety Disorder: These mainly include heredity, and childhood circumstances.

1. Heredity: The causes for generalized anxiety disorder can also be hereditary, in which a general personality type of parent is inherited in the child that predisposes over anxiousness. A recent study has also shown that people who posses a short form of the serotonin transfer gene also known as SERT are more vulnerable towards getting affected by anxiety disorder.
2. Childhood Circumstances As Causes of Generalized Anxiety Disorder:
Childhood circumstances can also lead a person to suffer from generalized anxiety disorder. These mainly include an overcautious view of the world from parents and excessive parental expectations.

• Overcautious view of the world from parents: This mostly happens when parents who are phobic themselves and due to sheer fear tend to set restrictions on their children. This causes an overcautious view of the outside world which in turn restricts the child’s exploring and risk taking abilities thereby making them excessively worrisome.

• Setting high standards: A child grown up with parents who are often critical, and tend to be perfectionist become insecure, imbibes the parent’s values, and avoids being in a situation where there is a fear of losing face. The child also becomes a perfectionist and self-critical and even starts criticizing others. Setting up perfectionist standards and excessive criticism are one of the common sources which cause insecurity in people. This makes them more vulnerable to generalized anxiety disorder.

• Parental rejection and abandonment: Generalized anxiety disorder can also affect a child if he/she experiences situations such as rejection, neglect or even abandonment from parents due to factors such as divorce, death, physical or sexual abuse. This can also lead to some kind of insecurity which forms the background of the generalized anxiety disorder.

3. Neurobiological causes: This is another factor responsible for generalized anxiety disorder. A specific system in the brain, known as the Gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) system, which is a naturally functioning neurotransmitter in the brain, is responsible to tone down the brain activity in the limbic system which is the center for emotions in the brain. It is said that generalized anxiety disorder takes place due to the deficiency of this GABA itself. A deficiently active GABA system creates an insufficient prohibition of limbic system known as locus coeruleus and amygdala this is responsible for almost all types of anxiety.