Anxiety, Mood, Dissociative and Somatoform Disorders

Anxiety, Mood, Dissociative and Somatoform Disorders Is it Anxiousness or Something More?

Psychology in Everyday Life Here the everyday life aspects of psychological issues will be focused on. Cynthianne Neighbors Gina Barrett Putt Anxiety, Mood, Dissociative and Somatoform Disorders Is it Anxiousness or Something More?

Anxiety – Morguefile According to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; anxiety can be nervous about a situation or it can be a type of disorder. A visit to your physician can help get you on the path to finding out if there is an underlying mental disorder that is disrupting your life.

Not all disorders are genetic, often times a mental disorder, such as an anxiety disorder can be caused by a traumatic event such as a car wreck, death of a loved one or emotional or physical abuse. Anxiety disorders listed in the DSM-V-TR are listed by symptom, the list of symptoms then are put into categories in the book. Each category has subcategories referred to as “umbrella” disorders. For example, under the main category, or umbrella of Anxiety, is also listed; generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorders, phobias and more. The primary set of symptoms of anxiety would gain the diagnosis of anxiety; the secondary set of symptoms defines the anxiety disorder

Generalized Anxiety Disorder

.Generalized Anxiety Disorder is diagnosed when a person has a history of anxiety that does not fit in the category of specific anxiety disorders. If you find yourself anxious avoiding people or places, lacking in general concentration and feeling a bit or a lot nervous most of the time, you may have general anxiety disorder.

Other symptoms may be muscle tension, heart pounding at inconsistent times and unrelated situations and onset of headaches. There are no secondary symptoms to consider with general anxiety disorder because of the overall but inconsistent symptoms.

Kind of like when a car needs a total tune up, everything is just “off” a little bit and needs some adjusting…for example. You can’t control what is going on in your car, it just happens and you need to help it just like with general anxiety disorder can the anxiety attacks be stopped without a little help.

Dissociative Disorder

 Dissociative Disorder is an anxiety disorder under the umbrella of anxiety, but with a set of sub symptoms that classify it as dissociative. Dissociative means to feel outside of your own body. A person with the sub symptoms of dissociation may feel that they are anxious but they feel literally “beside themselves”.

A person may be detached from the situation, not feel it is really themselves feeling anxious. The person will develop more personalities in order to handle the stress from the traumatic trigger of such a reaction.

This on the other end of the spectrum of anxiety disorders. The person is unable to cope with the pain of what caused the anxiety so their personality splits in order to handle the pain. The primary personality may be quiet and meek while the personality that handles the stress may be tough and mean, for example. The person suffering from this type of mental split will not be able to tell when the brain has triggered the other personality or personalities. The primary personality will feel as if they “blacked out” .

Not all anxiety will come to the point of dissociative disorders and neither will all traumatic events. Some anxiety can develop into Somatoform disorders.

Somatoform Disorders

Sometimes a person can suffer anxiety disorders that go untreated for so long that they develop into a somatoform disorder. Somatoform disorders are characterized as an anxiety disorder coupled with physical pain and certain psychological symptoms.

The person may develop an illness that has no real symptoms, just all over ill feeling. They may also develop involuntary movements like tremors or twitches. A person with somatoform disorder may also feel like a part of their body is defective when it is not, the person may become obsessed with fixing that body part, like a nose, for example.

The person suffering with this type of anxiety may feel like they will get sick, not that they do get sick, but have an overwhelming feeling of fear of illnesses (not to be confused with germaphobia). The person may have associated being sick with getting attention and began using that as a method of attention to the point of excess. This is much more severe of a general anxiety disorder and a mood disorder.

Mood Disorder

 Mood Disorder is when a person suffers deep depression and/or unusual elevated moods. The person may be anxious to the point of unable to function on a normal basis due to depression, such as wanting to stay in bed, not wanting to bathe etc… If the person is unusually elevated they will exhibit reckless behavior that could endanger themselves or others. These feelings of depression and elevated mood can both cause thoughts of suicide and can be dangerous to self and others. Feelings of sadness and over confident that last for a few days is not considered a mood disorder, the symptoms that last for more than two weeks fall in the category of mental illness.

 Help. A person with an anxiety disorder may not see or realize that they have a problem. It is often friends and family that bring it to the attention of the person suffering from such feelings. Help may come in something as simple as medication but may also need psychiatric intervention, depending on how severe the symptoms are. There is hope. Although depression can cause feelings of hopelessness and anxiety can cause fearful thoughts, it is important to stress to the person suffering from anxiety disorders that they may be able to get release of such anxiety with the help of a family physician or a mental health professional.