Anxiety: it needs to be treated to avoid developing other mental health problems

“A study carried out in Switzerland, which followed 10.000 young people for 30 years, showed that four out of every five cases of depression, in adulthood or early adulthood, generally arose from an untreated or mistreated anxiety disorder”, recalls the psychiatrist Márcio Bernik, coordinator of the Anxiety Disorders Program at the Institute of Psychiatry at the Hospital das Clínicas at the Faculty of Medicine at USP.  

 If anxiety disorder is a form of poor adaptation to chronic stress, depression is the failure of stress coping mechanisms.

Bernik explains that the pandemic was a period called perfect storm for the growth of these disorders because: people did not seek help and treatment for fear of becoming infected; new cases were not treated and treatments were discontinued; there are few mental health services and no psychiatric outpatient clinics in the country; the increase in psychosocial stress, due to the daily news of people dying, falling ill, in fear of losing jobs and an increase in crime. 

“You can’t pretend that the problem doesn’t exist. You can’t imagine that the person will resolve it alone”, says the doctor. There is no spontaneous remission of anxiety and depression, if the person does not seek treatment, they will not improve”, he explains.

“It’s not a person’s lack of moral courage, it’s not a weakness of character”, concludes Bernik. He also draws attention to Distress Disability Disadvantage, the three Ds, which help to understand and diagnose problems:

• distress – excessive suffering;
• Disability it is the inability to face the world as it is;
• Disadvantage – feeling of disadvantage in a company or college, because the person is unable to speak or express what they feel and the quality of their work drops.

“Within this context, you need to seek help, which involves a psychiatric evaluation, or at least a basic health unit with a doctor. The treatment is not necessarily a treatment with medication, in many cases you can opt for cognitive behavioral therapy, medication and, whenever possible, also psychotherapy”, says the psychiatrist. 

(Source: Jornal da USP)

See also:

Young people feel more effects of the pandemic on mental health, study says

The annual Mental State of the World report, released by the non-profit research organization Sapien Labs, showed that young people were the most affected by Covid-19 in terms of mental health. In Brazil, people aged 18 to 24 report 39% more complaints than those aged 55 to 64. Young people are five times more likely to report mental health complaints compared to their grandparents' generation, research shows.

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