To conclude, we note that the findings reported here herald a departure from a viewpoint that we first advocated more than twenty years ago (Kushner et al., 1990). We said then: “The authors reviewed relevant…studies and conclude that the relationship between alcohol problems and anxiety appears to be variable among the anxiety disorders.” (p. 685). Since that time, the advent of the massive NESARC database, along with quantitatively intense approaches to modeling disorder covariation (Krueger, 1999; Krueger and Markon, 2006), has allowed us to take a “macroscopic” view (Börner, 2011) of comorbidity that contradicts this earlier conclusion. The empirical data presented here lead us to conclude that the components of internalizing psychopathology that are associated with alcohol dependence are shared and cumulative among common anxiety and depressive disorders.
