PMID: 12436021

Issn Print: 0022-3018

Publication Date: 2002/11/01


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SOCIAL PHOBIA: STILL A NEGLECTED ANXIETY DISORDER?

Thomas Sheeran; Mark Zimmerman

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Author Information: Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, Brown Medical School, Rhode Island Hospital, 235 Plain Street, Suite 501, Providence RI 02905. Send reprint requests to Dr. Sheeran.

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Excerpt

In 1985, Liebowitz and colleagues described social phobia as “among the most neglected of the major anxiety disorders classified in DSM-III” (Liebowitz et al., 1985). In a review of the literature, they concluded that social phobia is common, chronic, sometimes disabling, and distinct from other phobic subtypes in terms of demographic and clinical characteristics. They emphasized that social phobia was relatively unstudied when compared to the other anxiety disorders, and called for more research to clarify the definition, classification, prevalence, severity, etiology, assessment, and treatment of social phobia. In almost two decades since the publication of this seminal article, the literature on social phobia has grown steadily, but only recently is it becoming widely recognized in the mental health research community as a significant and widespread clinical condition. For example, recently published articles emphasized the disorder’s high prevalence rate, comorbidity with other disorders, and underrecognition (Katzelnick and Greist, 2001;Lang and Stein, 2001;Lydiard, 2001).
Although the prevalence and clinical significance of social phobia has become more appreciated by the research community, it is uncertain whether this appreciation has extended to clinical practice, particularly with respect to screening and detection of the disorder. Recent research from this and other laboratories has suggested that when disorders are not the principle reason for presenting, they can be missed during routine clinical intakes (Shear et al., 2000;Zimmerman and Mattia, 1999a). The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the rate of recognition of social phobia in an outpatient psychiatric setting. We compared prevalence rates of social phobia among patients who were evaluated by routine clinical interview versus a structured research interview.
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