The History of Anxiety – Bridge Integrating Group Practice

When did the medical world start to understand anxiety disorders? Learn about the diagnosis and treatment of anxiety from ancient to modern times.

Doctors and therapists know a lot about anxiety. Education campaigns have helped the general public understand more about it, too. Many of us know at least the basics of what anxiety is and how to treat it.

But have we always known about it? When did humanity discover the concept of having an “anxiety disorder”? How did people deal with these disorders in the past?

You might be surprised to learn that although anxiety disorders have always been with us in some form, we knew very little about them until the start of the 20^th century.

When was anxiety first recognized?

Anxiety disorders have always been part of the human experience. Even as far back as 5,000 BCTrusted Source, descriptions of something that sounds like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) appear in ancient Indian writings.

But the study of anxiety really got its start about 2,000 years agoTrusted Source in the Greco-Roman world.

Ancient writers like Hippocrates, Cicero, and Seneca described people who had symptoms that we today recognize as anxiety symptoms, like irrational fears of certain situations or continual worry. They thought these symptoms might be related to disease or problems within the body.

History of anxiety diagnosis

Even though the Greco-Roman philosophers noticed anxiety symptoms, it took centuries for humans to make much progress in understanding anxiety.

In the 1600s,Trusted Source physicians and scholars began writing about a condition they called “melancholia.” Melancholia was a broad term that covered many different anxiety and depression symptoms.

Nervous conditions were also sometimes called “vapors.” Doctors didn’t fully understand that anxiety and depression were distinct conditions, or that there could be different kinds of anxiety disorders.

Humanity’s understanding of anxiety didn’t advance much in the next 200 years. A French medical textbook from the 1700s moved the needle forward by identifying a term called “panophobia.”

Panophobia was described as an intense fear at night that comes over a person for no reason. Modern psychologists would probably call this night terrors.

This textbook described subtypes of panophobia that match up with modern diagnoses like hypochondria or generalized anxiety disorder. Physicians were beginning to realize that these anxiety symptoms could actually be grouped into different categories.

The medical field really got interestedTrusted Source in defining and diagnosing anxiety in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It started with the term “neurasthenia” in 1869, which covered a broad range of anxious symptoms.

Psychiatrists like Sigmund Freud would expand on that term to refine the definitions of different types of anxiety even further. The first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) was published in 1952.

It was the first time that the medical community clearly defined and wrote down guidance about the subtypes of anxious conditions.

It took about 30 more years to fully understand these subtypes. Many of the anxiety diagnoses we’re familiar with today weren’t named until the DSM-IIITrusted Source in 1980, such as:

panic disorder
generalized anxiety disorder (GAD)
obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which is now considered in its own class of disorders
phobias

When was anxiety first recognized?

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