Gabriel Rubio
Cheryl Renee
ENC 1101 06M
1 May 2013
A: My audience is people who understand that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is successful in treating patients with anxiety disorders. They will be sensitive to the topic of addiction and will agree with the fact that pharmaceutical companies mostly care about profit and not the patient itself. They realize that many medications prescribed for anxiety are addictive. They are also aware of the fact that some doctors have been linked to benefiting from over prescribing medications that will put money in their pockets and benefit the pharmaceutical companies. Some people in the audience must be related or know someone with an anxiety disorder. They should also agree with the fact that some severe cases of anxiety must use medication because is the only thing that helps. The audience should be from different parts of the world and understand that anxiety could be cause by different types of situations.
S: How Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is more effective that medication on patients with anxiety.
P: To educate my audience on different treatments for anxiety and how can some be better than others.
Talk or Pill
Throughout the years pharmaceutical companies have provided different types of medication to treat patients with anxiety disorders. Doctors in the field of psychiatry have prescribed these medications that do not have a specific cure for the anxiety disorder being treated. The prescript medications simply lower the body to a state of calmness and does not cure the anxiety. Because the medication has this effect on the patient it creates a routine for the patient in which he or she has to take the medication in a daily basis and in some cases more than once a day. When the medication runs out the patient has to get more creating a profit for the pharmaceutical companies to have. What some patients do not know is that there are other alternatives for curing or controlling anxiety disorders. One of the most known treatments for treating anxiety and one of the most effective is cognitive behavioral therapy, also known as CBT. CBT allows the patient to get another perspective of the disorder and puts aside all the negative effects of medication such as, addiction to the medication, permanent side effects of the medication, and in some cases suicide.
In today’s society anxiety is defined as “a general term for several disorders that cause nervousness, fear, apprehension, and worrying” (Crosta). Anxiety is split up into different types of disorders ranging from phobias to Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. The most common anxiety disorder is GAD which is also known as Generalize Anxiety Disorder. “GAD affects 6.8 million adults, or 3.1% of the U.S. population, in any given year. Women are twice as likely to be affected” (“Generalized”). Most of the 6.8 million adults suffering from GAD are medicated and have not searched for other options of treatment making them dependent on the medication.
Because anxiety has many different branches to it, there are many types of treatments and medication that can help treat or stabilize the disorder. Specifically GAD, being the most common of all the anxiety disorders, has two main treatments. One of the treatments is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, also known as CBT. CBT “is effective for many people, helping them to identify, understand, and modify faulty thinking and behavior patterns” (“Generalized”). The second choice of treatment for GAD is medication. In some severe cases of GAD medication is prescribed to stabilize the symptoms and control the anxiety. “Some types of these drugs can be addictive and are usually prescribed on a short-term or as-needed basis” (“Treating 1”). Being most of the drugs prescribed