Welcome back to the podcast. I am joined today with Dr. Michael Cummings. He is going to

be talking with me today about social anxiety disorder and we will get into probably some

things going on that lead to social anxiety disorder, genetics, neurobiology,

brain stuff along with treatments, and I'm looking forward to this discussion.

Yes indeed. I'm happy to be back and to be talking about this. We sometimes don't seem to

focus enough on the anxiety disorders. As a group, they are the most common type of psychiatric

disorder, but they receive less attention in general than things like major depression and

schizophrenia and bipolar illness. Of course, social anxiety disorder is one of those disorders.

The prevalence numbers I found in the US population seem to range from around 8 to 12 percent

of people at some point meet criteria for social anxiety disorder. A little more prevalent

in women of 4 to 3 ratio women to men. Indeed, the core of the illness is either fear of being

scrutinized or fear of performance, which indeed those often go hand in hand, can be very

disabling for some people in terms of preventing them from being able to do things in their life

that they would like to do, but they are too anxious to pursue them.

There's something, it's like the anxiety rises to a level in which they stop doing the things

that they might enjoy or may need to do because of social aspects. With children, specifically,

it's around other children that they will have the increased fear and if it's just around

adults that it's not considered social anxiety for children, but it needs if it's around other

children that it could be considered social anxiety. Indeed, people who have looked at this in terms

of evolutionary history clearly human beings benefit greatly from being a member of a group

or not highly effective at doing things all by ourselves. In many ways, a lot of those theorists

have hypothesized that social anxiety disorder really comes out of a fear of being rejected by the

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