Introduction: Focus on Social Anxiety Disorder

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The second meeting of the International Consensus Group on Depression and Anxiety, which met in New York in April 1998, took as its subject the most prevalent of the serious anxiety disorders, social phobia. With a lifetime prevalence of 10% to 15%, this disorder typically starts in adolescence and, if untreated, imposes lifelong disability in the social, familial, and working lives of sufferers. 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.