Anxiety and Depression Disorders Portland OR

1. Common anxiety and clinical depression are types of "neurosis”. Psychosis is the term for a mental disorder that causes a person to lose touch with reality and that may cause them to have hallucinations and delusions. Mental disorders that are in the psychosis category include bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Anxiety and common clinical depression are both in the neurosis category, meaning they are stress- and nerve-related and not caused by a severe underlying mental disorder.
   
   Persons with severe forms of depression, such as bipolar disorder, may have psychotic episodes but your more common type of clinical depression anxiety disorders are not in the psychosis category, but rather are types of neurosis (psychoneurosis). According to the National Institute of Mental Health, psychosis affects an estimated 1% of the U.S. population, while the more common anxiety and depression conditions affect a much higher percentage (perhaps as many as 1 in 4 or 25% of the American population experience an anxiety disorder and/or clinical depression at some time during their lives).
   
2. Anxiety-related “depersonalization” and “de-realization” can be mistaken for psychotic episodes. Depersonalization is an anxiety-induced experience where a person feels he or she is “unreal” or no longer exists as a person. They may even feel they are no longer visible to other people and that others around them remain real but they no longer are. Some patients describe it as feeling like they are watching their own actions from outside of themselves, and they no longer feel like a human being but have become robotic. Patients have described episodes, for example, of looking at their own face in a mirror and wondering if they are really there. They may also feel as if they no longer recognize themselves and feel as if they are having an identity crisis.
   
   De-realization, is similar, except that the person’s surroundings seem to lose reality. With de-realization, an anxiety sufferer will have episodes of experiencing feelings that their surroundings have become unreal. They may also feel as if reality itself is no longer something they can fully recognize during these moments. They may also question the reality of many things at these times, and may begin to wonder if life is simply a dream of some type. Some anxiety sufferers describe this experience as being like “living inside a bubble”, or like they are trying to see everything through a haze or a thick fog. This is also referred to as “brain fog”.
   
   Anxiety sufferers need to understand the fact that these de-realization and depersonalization symptoms do not indicate that they are going insane or actually losing touch with reality. They are both very common occurrences in anxiety sufferers, especially those who experience panic attacks and will not cause damage to a person’s mind or sanity. This fear of going insane is a very concerning one to people who experience severe anxiety and panic, and also to those who experience major/clinical depression. Indeed, anxiety and panic often co-exist, but these are irrational thoughts that will not happen. ...

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Author: James Lowrance