Understanding Depression and Anxiety

Last Updated on Wednesday, 23 December 2009 12:55 Written by Natural Health Team Wednesday, 23 December 2009 12:55

Although either depression or anxiety can be a disabling condition on its own, the combination can be particularly challenging. If you’re already depressed, anxiety is a multiplier of suffering.
Depression can make people feel profoundly discouraged, helpless, and hopeless. Anxiety can make them agitated and besieged by physical symptoms — a pounding heart, tightness in the chest, sweating, and difficulty in breathing.

“People who have both depression and anxiety feel very low, down in the dumps, and unmotivated,” says Jerilyn Ross, MA, LICSW, president and CEO of the Anxiety Disorders Association of America. “But their minds are also racing, they can’t concentrate, they can’t sit still. It’s a very tough combination.”

It’s also tough to control. “It’s important for people to recognize that when they have both depression and anxiety, it may be more difficult for them to get all the way well,” Cook says. That’s not to say they won’t recover fully, but that it may take more work, he says.

People diagnosed with both depression and anxiety tend to have

* More severe symptoms
* More functional impairment
* More trouble finding the right treatment
* A higher risk of suicide

Some people who are depressed have a distinct anxiety disorder, like panic disorder, social anxiety disorder, or generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), Ross says. Many others don’t have full-fledged anxiety disorders, but more general anxiety symptoms that accompany their depression.
The fact that depression and anxiety so often co-occur has led some researchers to speculate — controversially — that they may not always be different conditions. “It’s possible that in time, we’ll come to see anxiety and depression together as representing a distinct illness separate from either condition by itself,” Cook says.

For the time being, dozens or even scores of panic attack treatments are found circulating everywhere with the intention of finding the cure or remedy for anxiety panic attacks and relieving depression and other life threatening mental health issues.

Anxiety

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