When is anxiety a disorder? — a clinical guide for Indians

Every Indian household has a worrier. What separates the household worrier from a clinical anxiety disorder is not the presence of worry — it is the frequency, the physical footprint, and the interference with functioning.

Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD) requires excessive worry, more days than not, for six months or more, about multiple domains, with three or more physical symptoms (restlessness, fatigue, irritability, muscle tension, sleep disturbance, concentration difficulty) and clinically significant interference with work or relationships. The GAD-7 screener on this site maps closely to these criteria.

Anxiety in Indian patients often presents somatically first — chest tightness, gut issues, tension headaches, unexplained fatigue — and gets routed through cardiologists and gastroenterologists for months before someone thinks of the mental-health frame. If you have had a full physical workup and everything is normal but the symptoms persist, please take the GAD-7. It is the missing test in most Indian care pathways.

Recurrent unexpected panic attacks with a persistent fear of the next one is panic disorder — very treatable, usually with CBT and sometimes an SSRI for a short period. Intense fear of social evaluation that leads to avoidance of everyday situations is social anxiety disorder — also very treatable, and often responds well to exposure work combined with the Cognitive Regulation approach I use in practice.

Take the GAD-7 today. Talk to the AI Psychologist about your score. If you are in the moderate or severe band, book a session — the difference between the untreated version of your next twelve months and the treated version is very large.