Social Anxiety Disorder

Social anxiety disorder (or social phobia) is a type of anxiety that usually affects people in social interactions (especially with people they don’t know well) or public speaking engagements. It is often driven by a fear of being judged by others.

Medication for these conditions frequently involves the use of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), but there are other medications that can be beneficial if these are not effective or not tolerated. I have found that many people have a significant reduction of social phobia symptoms when their SSRI dose reaches about 75% of the FDA-recommended max doses. Often treatment failures for these symptoms are a result of the dose not being high enough.

I have also seen people who have symptoms similar to social phobia because life-long attention problems affect their ability to focus during social interactions. Sometimes these people respond better to just treating their underlying attention problems.