Many people think of anxiety disorders as something like a fear of walking into a room full of strangers, or perhaps a strong fear of public speaking. They might recognize a condition like agoraphobia, a fear of leaving the home or going into open spaces, as an anxiety disorder, but don't think much beyond that. But there are other types of social phobias and disorders that fall into this category, some of which receive very little attention from the general public. And all of them have characteristics that make them difficult either to diagnose or to treat.

Eating disorders may be distantly recognized by most people as having some relation to anxiety, but they are probably more associated in people's minds with things like peer pressure or obsessive compulsive behavior. But conditions like anorexia, bulimia or binge eating, while they are all associated with eating and a preoccupation with body weight or shape, can sometimes stem from traumatic experiences like child abuse or anxieties produced by family or peer pressure. Disorders that relate to eating behaviors are indeed anxiety disorders. Even if there are also some physical causes, the underlying anxieties are often the trigger for the conditions.

Sometimes an anxiety disorder manifests in very specific phobias, associated either with a traumatic event or a particular type of activity. One of those is the phobia about going to school that hits a surprising number of children between the ages of five and about twelve. Of the various sorts of anxiety disorders, this one can take the longest time to recognize and diagnose, because a child's fears about school are often dismissed as unimportant. Yet a lack of diagnosis could result in adverse consequences for many years.

While a panic disorder is clearly a type of anxiety, it can often be mistaken for other sorts of anxiety disorders. It can simply stand on its own, meaning that finding a cause might be difficult, since panic attacks seem to come spontaneously without being obviously connected to anything. There are difficulties with all three of these disorders. With eating problems, there may be no discoverable root cause, while a phobia about school might not even get diagnosed. And panic attacks may seem to flood in from nowhere. Living with an anxiety disorder is challenging enough, but some disorders can be more challenging than others.

Sometimes anxiety disorders are hard to diagnose, and while the symptoms may suggest one type of condition, the problem is really a different one altogether. The more obscure or tricky disorders give doctors a run for their money, as they try to figure out exactly what's wrong.