Depression and Anxiety

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Though depression and anxiety are so commonly seen in today's hasty world, most of the people do not indentify or differentiate between these two mental conditions. Let us try to have a look on anxiety and depression.

Anxiety is a human character that is quite normal to have! In its 'normal' functioning, anxiety helps with vigilance, learning and individual's overall performance. Simply put, anxiety is useful. Nevertheless, anxiety, when excesses, it may start working against the human body. Extremes of self-centeredness and apprehension soon take over the human brain and decrease the performance, maybe it gets aggravated by some particular group of emotions (like anger, pity, guilt or gloominess mixed with a some unknown fear) that can then establish a clear 'anxiety' as a disorder.

Anxiety and experiencing stress are common features that could be a simple brain's response to some pressure, or better to say more intolerable or persistent pressures due to one or the other reasons; maybe personal or professional. And this need not mean a single, flooding out difficulty as it is more often an accumulation of adverse things. There is something called Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), which is probably commonest anxiety disorder that affects 5-6% of the world's population. It is characterized by chronic worrying about all kinds of personal and professional problems and circumstances. It differs from normal worrying in degree, frequency and uncontrollability.

On the other hand, depression got nothing to do with weakness and there is no particular race, breed or age that makes an individual to be prone to have depression. Depression can never be beneficial in any of its form or degree whereas anxiety, in a normal level is good. You are just anxious about whether you get 'first rank' or not whereas you cannot have depression about it!

In fact, the word 'depression' is an umbrella term, used to include a very wide range of issues, from short spans of dull mood to a lifelong mind-numbing incapability to behave normally. Here, majority of dull mood cases get sort out automatically and do not seek any medical intervention. Nevertheless, at any one time, between 5 per cent and 10 per cent of the population do suffer from depression at a level that requires some sort of support, and it is likely that 20 per cent of us may suffer from depressive episodes one or the other time in our lifetime.

Depression may affect anyone, but, as it is noticed in anxiety disorders, there are certain risk factors which turn the problem to go worse. Such factors include childhood abuse, major trauma, a problem or personal issues with grandparent or parents, or losing a parent or partner in a very young age etc.

The treatment for depression and anxiety depends upon the causes. However, in any case, mental counseling is important. Many health care providers prefer to go for natural treatment for depression and anxiety than modern medicines. Behavior therapies, holistic exercises such as yoga and meditation have promising results.