Implicit in our mission statement for this new initiative, which is to improve the management of patients with depression and anxiety disorders, is the need to increase awareness and understanding of these conditions among clinicians and their patients. Terminology is important. The DSM-IV committee already recognizes both social phobia and social anxiety disorder as descriptors for the condition. In the United States, patient groups feel strongly that the term phobia trivializes the disorder and they are strongly in favor of social anxiety disorder . We believe social anxiety disorder is the better term and draw an analogy with panic disorder, in which the anxiety and phobic components were not at first separated.
Panic attacks are the primary symptom of panic disorder, and the avoidance behavior is secondary.
Some people do endure the social situation, albeit with great distress, so that we could have social anxiety with and without avoidance, analogous to panic disorder with and without agoraphobia. We feel that it is time to adopt social anxiety disorder as the preferred descriptor. This is the term that we will use throughout this supplement. Despite being currently viewed as a personality disorder, avoidant personality disorder appears to respond to treatments that are effective in social phobia.