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Sociological Imagination: Generalized Anxiety Disorder

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Sociological Imagination: Generalized Anxiety Disorder
“Anxiety is the signal of danger which mobilizes the human organism’s resources at all levels of functioning in the interests of conservation, defense, and self- preservation.” (Anxiety 1) If a person suffers from anxiety there is a major loss of control and then an attempt to regain that control because of a fear that they have. Anxiety disorders are one of the most frequently occurring mental disorders in the United States. However, anxiety disorders are not only found in the United States. They are found throughout the world. They just happen to be most predominating in the United States. In this paper, I will be discussing the generalized anxiety disorder and how if effects society today.
The sociological Imagination allows a person to look at a social problem past the particular circumstances of a certain person and look at how it affects people as a whole. Using this theory sociologist have been taught to ignore individuals and look at society as a whole. Social forces are a big part of the sociological imagination. Social forces are anything that affects society. So, a social forces could be anything from culture to government. C. Wright Mill was the American sociologist who first came up with the sociological imagination. In order to fully use the sociological imagination you must first have an understanding of his or her life and circumstances. The big part of his theory was to focus on social issues and not individual issues. Being able to take a perspective on any issue is very helpful because you can see what is causing it in many people and not just a certain individual. A Sociologist doesn’t ever study just one person; they study large groups of people. They bring together similar ideas and come to a conclusion on society as a whole. An important aspect of the sociological imagination is people effect social forces at the same time that social forces are effect people. The sociological imagination is most often used to explain major problems in



Bibliography: Basowitz, Harold. Anxiety and Stress. McGraw-Hill Book company: New York. “Generalized Anxiety Disorder”. <http://www.nlm.nih.gov/ > . 16 May, 2006.

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