Anxiety and Depression

Any practitioner who promises you freedom from all anxiety and sadness might as well offer to sell you the moon...It's just not gonna happen! Anxiety and low mood are core, often rational parts of the human experience.

All too often, however, anxiety can become excessive, relentless, intrusive, overwhelming, seemingly nonsensical, or mysteriously free-floating. Many people who see me have common anxiety presentations such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic disorder, or generalized anxiety disorder. I have years of experience treating these distressing syndromes, and even though they number among the most common psychological conditions, I still marvel that they are seldom what they seem on the surface.

Sadness is not the same thing as depression, and joy is not the same thing as mania. Mood disorders can be obvious, subtle, or even so insidious as to be hard to recognize until physiological changes make it difficult to function.  Like anxiety disorders, the salient features of depressive and bipolar disorders can be cognitive, emotional, somatic, or behavioral. Some depressed people are overtly sad and hopeless; others, guilty, self-loathing, or irritable. While being a "glass half-empty" kind of person isn't a problem per se, chronic pessimism and hopelessness are. Then, too, the swings of bipolar disorders from depression to mania are incredibly destabilizing. Mood disorders can cause disturbances in sleep, concentration, appetite, energy level, and motivation. Worst of all, a depressive disorder may feel permanent to the sufferer -- which is often not the case with the right treatment.