ANXIETY DISORDERS

Anxiety appears as a feeling of nervousness, apprehension, fear, or worry. We have all experienced it at one time or another. Usually our fears and worries are justified, such as worry in anticipation of taking exam. However, anxiety may occur without a cause, or it may be out of proportion to the reason. Severe anxiety can have a serious impact on daily life.

Anxiety disorder is an excessive, unrealistic, and difficult to control worry over a period of at least six months. It's associated with three of the following:

· Restlessness

· Easily tired

· Trouble concentrating

· Irritability

· Muscle tension

· Sleep problems

Anxiety can be accompanied by a variety of physical symptoms. It may appear upset stomach, diarrhea, trouble breathing, feel as if one may faint or like having a heart attack.

Basic kinds of anxiety disorders

Panic Attacks – often experienced as a feeling of an intense fear that something terrible is about to happen, like you might die or lose your sanity. These experiences can be extremely frightening and seem quite unusual when first encountered.

Agoraphobia – a fear of being in the environment that is unfamiliar, where we have only little control upon a situation. It may include wide open spaces, crowded places, or travelling. It is often connected with a social embarrassment, as the agoraphobic fears of having a panic attack in public. Many agoraphobics will only frequent a few secure locations, such as their home, a specific route to work, or sometimes the homes of friends or relatives. In the extreme, they will not leave their home.

Depersonalization - It is a feeling of watching oneself act, while having no control over a situation. A person is feeling like in a movie or in a dream, it’s a feeling of disconnection from a body, and the external world seems strange or unreal

Social Anxiety: This can include social nervousness, shyness, fear of public speaking, or just general anxiety sensations while interacting: stress, rapid heartbeat, sweaty palms, etc.

Phobias

Phobia is the unrelenting fear of a situation, activity, or thing that causes one to want to avoid it.

Phobias are largely underreported, probably because many phobia sufferers find ways to avoid the situations to which they are phobic. Objects or situations causing phobia can be really diverse, sometimes even surprising.

Here is a list of the few interesting ones:

Alliumphobia – Fear of garlic.
Ambulophobia – Fear of walking.
Anuptaphobia – Fear of staying single.
Consecotaleophobia – Fear of chopsticks.
Coprastasophobia – Fear of constipation.
Dextrophobia – Fear of the right-side of the body.
Geumaphobia – Fear of taste.
Gnosiophobia – Fear of knowledge.

Hellenologophobia – Fear of Greek terms.
Kakorrhaphiophobia – Fea r of defeat.
Melophobia – Fear or hatred of music.
Oikophobia – Fear of home surroundings.
Osmophobia – Fear of smells or odors.
Peladophobia – Fear of baldness.
Peniaphobia – Fear of poverty.
Photoaugliaphobia – Fear of glaring lights.
Phronemophobia – Fear of thinking.
Sitiophobia – Fear of food or eating.
Xyrophobia – Fear of razors

Heksakosjoiheksekontaheksafobia– Fear of number 666

http://www.psychologyinfo.com/problems/panic_disorder.html

http://www.anxietynetwork.com/pdhome.html

http://www.apa.org/topics/anxiety/panic-disorder.aspx

School Violence

School violence is become a serious problem in recent decades in many countries, especially when weapones such as guns or knives are involved. It includes violence between students, but also between student and school stuff.

School violence wears many faces. It includes gang activity, locker thefts, bullying and intimidation, gun use, assault - just about anything that produces a victim. Violence is perpetrated against students, teachers and stuff, and ranges from international vendettas to accidental killings of bystanders. Often, discussions of school violence are lumped together wth discussions of school discipline generally, as both involve questions of how to maintain order in a school.

This diagram shows us how school violence is unroll in the USA, Virginia

We divide school violence-prevention methods into three classes - measure related to school management (that is, related to discipline and punishment), measure related to enviromental modification (for instance, video cameras, security guards, and uniforms), and educational nad curriculum-based measure (for instance, conflict-resolution and gang-prevention programs). Offcourse all this methods have their advantages and disadvantages.

In Poland in 2006 response to the suicide of a girl after she was sexually molested in school, the Polish Minister of Education, launched a "zero tolerance" school reform. Under this plan, teacher would have the legal statusof civil servants, making violent crimes against them punishable by higher penalties. Head teacher will be, in theory, able to send agressive pupils to perform community service and this students' parents may also be fined. Teachers who fail to report violent acts in school could face a prison sentence.

What do you think about school violence? How we can prevent such situations in schools?

Safety on the streets.

Streets in our country are not only bad in their quality and look. We also have to deal with problem related to people who drive on these streets. In the first part of this blog I would like to take a look at physical condition of the streets. Then I will focus on the problems such as drink-driving, exceeding speed limits and rude driving.

Despite that streets are being improved, most of them still are in a condition leaving much to be desired. Experts say that the main problem is in the type of facing. All new streets in Poland are made from asphalt, which is quite flexible and vulnerable to creating holes. That's why new streets after just a year or even few months of using have to be patched in many places. Concrete is thought to be the best material to build streets because it's solid and rugged. However, it is also very expensive. Nevertheless, we should answer the question what is more efficient and profitable: paying for patching cheap streets or paying for expensive streets which will last for a long time.

Whatever the answer would be, there should something done. The street isn't supposed to be a place where people are stressed and afraid of driving because of the holes which sometimes are really sizeable.

Now, I would like to throw some light on culture in the streets. Once, there was a survey concerning the skills of drivers. The percent of people claiming that their driving skills are very good amounted to 98%. Still, there are too many minor as well as serious accidents. The question is if the other 2% cause these accidents along with drink-driving.?

In my opinion there are three main reasons responsible for the number of accidents as well as enormous traffic jams. These are: egoism, lack of humility and of course not obeying the rules.

Many of us are in a hurry at least sometimes. We run out of our house with a piece of bread in our mouth and jump into the car. Then we push the pedal to the max and rush to our workplace. Everything is perfect until we are stopped by a jam. Then we start to contrive how to overcome the jam or just hop before the car driving ahead of us. The problem most of us never consider is that we are not the only ones in a hurry. Imagine that there is a jam and everybody wants to be in front of everybody. That's were the street conflicts and later stress are born. That reminds of the most common situation. For instance, let's take a junction with lights and there are two lanes. One lane is going ONLY to the left. The other one is going only straight. Now picture that there are a lot of cars waiting to turn left and the lane to go straight is empty. What many people would think in such situation?- "Hmm, I can just jump on the empty lane and hop in just before the first car. I won't stand here like these suckers." But what would be if all of us were this smart? It is statistically proved that such people worsen the fluency of traffic even by 40%. People from the traffic managment say that if everybody was driving properly without changing lanes all the time and without exceeding speed limits, the jams would reduce even by 20-30%.

The next subject I would like to emphasize is driving after drugs and alcohol. Everybody condemns these activities but still there are many people who do that. Moreover, there are people who denounce drink-driving and simultaneously drive after alcohol. The excuse are that: "Oh, I live just four blocks away" or "I had a couple of drinks but I feel good" etc. I would like to cite one of the conversations I had with my acquintance. His opinion was that drink drivers should be separated or eliminated. Once however, I heard that him and the other two guys were driving when they all were drunk. They were speeding 130km/h on one street but all the roads there had a priority and the speed limit was 40 km/h. When I heard this story, I shouted at him that they were total idiots and if I was there, I would have beat up everyone of them. He was outraged and said that I was stiff, because he was driving with his best friend and he had trusted him. I told him then that he should imagine the situation that his father would be driving into that street(he would have priority in joining the traffic). I asked what would be if they crashed into his father's car and killed him. After this my friend said that he never thought of that this way and that he would never ever do that again.

I also fear that such idiot could kill someone from my family. I know that someone can have a bad moment in his life and in a result get drunk and then drive. However, I don't feel obliged to share his sadness and I don't have to pay for his problems or fun by losing someone close.

Career or family?

In the past women got married at a very early age and stayed at home to run the household and look after the children. They have to cook, keep the house clean, wash up, help the children with the homework, take out the rubbish, hoover, care for the pets, do the daily shopping, iron and sew. There is a lot of chores for them! That is real, hard and not-paid job…

Here you have a housewife song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC50T7UdNIg

However there is some women, who love being a housewife.

Here is the News story about The Happy Housewife and how she saves money:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1OsgFMzv-c

Nowadays, most women work professionally and they have to combine a job and a family. This, however, is not easy to requires a lot of effort, stamina and persistence.

At the same time, employers are unwilling to take or promote the women who rear children because they are afraid that they may not be as efficient and concentrated on their work as men. Hence, high-level positions still seem to be reserved for men. There are still too few women politicians, judges, uniwersity professors, ambassadors or managing directors… Instead , they work as typists, shop-assistants, nurses or hair-dressers… But this situation is changes slowly for the women right :)

Some ambitious women who put their career first decide to live alone and not get married to have the same chances in life as men.

What about man?

Husband only from time to time help women by picking up the children from some after-school activities or doing some minor repairs. They often in the evening sitting and watching matches with a bottle of beer and does not care about anything…

Nowadays, women try to ,,educate’’ their husbands and get them equally involved in keeping the house and caring for the kids. Unfortunately, very few are successful…

Currently some women has to only earn money and support the family. Then women can devote himself entirely to her career while her husband doing numerous domestic chores and rear the children.

Still, more and more women prove that even having less physical strenght and twice as many duties as men,they manage to complete with them and be successful mothers, housewives and career women.

Anyway, what man would be able to cope with having the home and work on his hands? :)