Rachael Artig
Moore
BIO 016
July 26, 2014
Assessing Scientific Credibility For this assignment, I chose Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Generalized Anxiety Disorder is when a person feels fear and anxiety about everyday activities that contain very little or no stress factors. Many times the person can realize their anxiety is more intense than the situation warrants but are not able to get rid of the fear. GAD is known to be hereditary, but researchers are still unclear as to why this happens to some people and not others. It affects about 3.1% of americans 18 and older, and twice as often in women than men. The treatment for this disorder is a combination of psychotherapy and medication. Generalized Anxiety Disorder is something I have dealt with since I was in middle school, and only recently has it gotten to the point where I am seeking medical treatment. These past few months I have done a lot of research on the topic and feel familiar with websites that I found to be very informative and helpful. Since a young age, I was taught that educational websites ended in .org, .gov, and .edu, so that is where I started my research. I only looked for websites with that web address because it was more likely that I would find a credible source than something like wikipedia.com. The websites that I have found to be really helpful when researching Generalized Anxiety Disorder were http://www.nimh.nih.gov/index.shtml and https://www.adaa.org. Both of these websites I found to be very credible and helpful to my research. The first website I found was The National Institute of Mental Health’s website. It is a division of the website for the National Institutes of Health, which I used many times for this class’s discussions and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Every article on the website has a visible author and a way of seeing the author’s credentials and other articles or studies they have participated in. The articles are all very straight forward and are not trying to persuade you to buy a product or seek a certain type of treatment. This website is straight forward with the facts and nothing else. Another website I found was for the Anxiety and Depression Association of America. This website is run by ADAA, which is a nonprofit organization and all of their articles are published by them. I really found this website to be insightful and informative on the issue. Although the last website gave a lot of information on the disorder, this one offered resources for treatment and other websites that might be beneficial. Both websites I found to be very clear in their information and offering a lot of outside resources about Generalized Anxiety Disorder. A website I found to be bad was an ad for an all natural instant anxiety cure. Its a pill called Tranquilene on the website