The Correlation Between Anxiety and Depression

If you're like most people, there are occasions when you've felt depressed. You may feel a little sad or sorry for yourself. It can be triggered by an event that has just happened. Or sometimes, it can happen for no reason whatsoever. Some people can also get depressed because of the weather. A mental disorder called Seasonal Affective Disorder is even reported to be triggered by the lack of light!

What is Depression?

It's difficult to define depression. Because it can mean different things to different people. A person who seems positive on the exterior may shock others by jumping to their death, while the person who always grumble and seems negative is still holding on to life. It's not always easy to know if a person is having depression. And it can be vastly different for different people.

Clinical depression, however is an illness. People who are diagnosed with that condition tend to have committed suicide at one point of their lives. They often find it tough to keep a job or relationship and tend to look at things from an extremely negative point of view. A person who is severely depressed for a prolonged period of time is considered to be suffering from clinical depression.

Anxiety and It's Correlation To Depression

While depression can make a person tired and disinterested in activities they used to take pleasure in, anxiety makes them feel the opposite. It makes them quirky, nervous and in a constant state of fear. It's the fear of the unknown. There are various ways anxiety disorder is manifested and the root of it, which many psychiatrists consider, is depression. People who are depressed can also feel anxious many a time.

Ways that anxiety reflects itself include conditions such as general anxiety disorder, anorexia nervosa, obsessive compulsive disorder, phobias, social anxiety disorder and so on. Though they seem to be all different syndromes that manifest in different ways, they all relate to one thing - control.

People suffering from anxiety are constantly in need to gain control of something. For example, a person with obsessive compulsive disorder is forever worrying about the doors being unlocked, germs or the whole house burning down. He or she then do certain things over and over again to give them control over that worry. Such as checking the door every other hour. Or disinfecting the house every day. The worry is more about the fear of the unknown.

Anxiety also spark off panic attacks. When this happens, a person may feel as if they're having a heart attack. The symptoms do appear to point to an heart attack and it's not surprising to find sufferers landing up at the hospital's emergency department. They're often relieved when they find that the pain they had was just an anxiety attack. Until the whole saga repeats by itself.

Anxiety attacks can be severe as there are situations where people have fainted as a result of hyperventilation. It can occur in any circumstance. Sometimes even when one's driving. It also raises one's blood pressure, making the person feel as if he's crawling out of their skins.