Could anxiety be a genetic disorder? Father has anxiety and I do?

I am not a medical professional, but I can tell you that it is absolutely possible to have anxiety or panic disorder that was passed down to you through genetics. I have very severe anxiety that I struggle with on a daily basis. My mother, and her mother (my grandma) both have chronic anxiety as well. The strange part is that my grandma and I seem to have much more severe symptoms than my mom does, and we also seem to get attacks much more frequently than my mom does. My grandma and I have times where it seems like we're getting one panic attack after another, back to back, constantly for days or weeks at a time. My mom, however, generally only gets one really bad anxiety attack like we get a few times a month at the most. So it seems, in our situation at least, that it has kind of skipped a generation in a way. My grandma and I seem to have almost identical disorders.

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We both get almost no relief unless we take medication like xanex or something similar, and even then it only lasts for a few hours tops and then we either have to take more meds or the panic creeps back up hard and fast, and all we can do is literally just try to survive from one minute to the next for anywhere from a few hours all the way up to a week sometimes before it finally starts to subside and we have some relief for however long it lasts. Anyway, my point is that all three of us suffer from anxiety but for whatever reason the worst of it seems to skip a generation. Only time will tell for sure if my daughter doesn't have it as badly as my grandma and I, or even better if she doesn't get it at all. I would do anything to spare my daughter and her kids and so on from having to deal with any anxiety at all, but obviously there is only so much I can do to help. I will be interested to find out if my grandchildren unfortunately end up with anxiety like mine and if the pattern continues to repeat itself. Oh and btw I am currently on Celexa myself, and I definitely suggest that you at least give it a try for a few weeks and just see if it makes a difference. If not, tell your doctor it isn't helping and he will probably either up your dose or have you try something else, if you want to of course. I totally get what you're saying about not wanting to have to take something every day, but unfortunately the fact is that you have an illness that you will more than likely have the rest of your life, and if you don't want it to control and ruin your life, you'll have to manage it with medication, which will also be for the remainder of your lifetime. It's really no different than finding out you have diabetes and have to take insulin every day to help manage it. It sucks, but it's part of your life now, and if you try to just pretend it isn't there by refusing to take the proper medications, I'm sorry to say, but it's not going to go away. In fact, if you try to ignore it, not only will it not get ANY better, but eventually it will become much much worse and will completely take control of your entire life without you even realizing how much worse it's gotten or that you are not the person you used to be, because your illness will have slowly taken over and before you know it you aren't making any of your own decisions anymore at all. Your spirit will slowly but surely become a smaller and smaller part of your overall functioning process. All the little individual aspects of your personality that make you (and us all) unique, and make you who you are, would be almost totally forgotten altogether. Every choice you made from the very smallest to the biggest and most important would no longer be decided by the influences of the real you, your previous experiences with various parts of your life, your likes or dislikes, your morals, values, or instincts. None of those things and all the many others that tell us all how to make each and every decision that we will ever make in life, which therefore is the cause behind everything we do in our lifetime. But if you don't get control over it, it will get control over you.