A common fear of people who have anxiety is that they will “go crazy.”  They’ll be permanently crazy and locked up in a psych ward for the rest of their lives.  The truth is, that people who have such fears, do NOT actually ever “go crazy.”  People who, “lose their minds,” in the schizophrenic sense, do not worry about going crazy.  They talk about that colony of martians that has taken up home in their armpit, as my mentor likes to say.  So, if your worried about going crazy, you most likely just have anxiety.  And anxiety cannot harm you permanently in any way.  This is a hard thing for people with anxiety to learn.  Once they learn it, they can realize that they have control, and can put themselves more freely in situations that provoke their anxiety.  They can begin to take control, and fight against their anxiety.  Avoidance of feared situations, is actually what increases, and maintains anxiety.  If you repeatedly expose yourself to the situation that causes anxiety, and you make that choice to do so, your anxiety will decrease.  You may have to start out with a situation that provokes a moderate amount of anxiety.  After you master this situation, it will be easier for you to tackle more difficult situations.  If you can’t do this on your own, you can enlist the help of a trained psychologist to help you do so.  With my approach, I like to find out what purpose the anxiety serves before working on removing it.  That way, you can work on replacing the purpose the anxiety serves with a better option.  A way of coping or adequately dealing with the unconscious aspect of the purpose the anxiety serves.