Prevention of Anxiety Disorders

This chapter on the prevention of anxiety disorders in adolescents considers intervention studies, but before this it is important to briefly consider what is known about risk and protective factors at the individual, familial, and societal level, because it is knowledge of these factors and their interrelations that should inform the development of specific intervention strategies. Unfortunately, knowledge of such factors is limited, and perhaps the paucity of prevention studies in anxiety disorders is a direct result of this limited knowledge. Of particular concern is the absence of evidence about protective factors that are specific to anxiety disorders. That is, although the youth resilience literature has generally underscored the importance of factors such as high IQ, selfesteem, social support, and positive coping in serving to protect young people from the development of psychopathology in general, there is a paucity of literature regarding whether any protective factor(s) may serve to protect against anxiety disorders in particular. Certainly, development of effective prevention programs will continue to be hampered until evidence-based knowledge has accumulated in this area. The summary below is thus reflective of this in proportion to the literature; that is, considerable more coverage is paid to risk factors than to protective factors.