How closely is anxiety related to depression? Well, sometimes it seems they are almost one and the same thing.
For some people one leads to another. Obviously feeling anxious and scared of things can be so debilitating that it is easy to see why people become unhappy and in some cases get clinical depression. While often people get depressed. It can also happen the other way round. Depression tends to leave the sufferer worrying and feeling miserable about the future, two factors which can easily bring on anxiety and panic attacks.
But what if the link is more than a cause and effect? Perhaps, in some cases, anxiety and depression can have the same root, or anxiety can mask depression. It is certainly accepted that anxiety can be a mask for other symptoms. I found, as I unravelled my anxiety, a lot of depression underneath, I found that most of the things I had felt scared to do in the past I now had no desire to do, as if they were going to be black and awful. In that sense my phobias in effect got worse, although I felt not so much anxiety as depression.
The good news was that that heralded the end. It was a case of dealing again with the underlying attitudes, the problem was that in that state you don’t actually want to change, because that will mean taking on all the things you don’t want to do.
What’s the answer? Well, just to keep chipping away at it until it cracks and breaks up. I would certainly recommend doing more than just CBT, CBT when you are depressed is a miserable business anyway, and CBT for depression isn’t that great when you don’t really understand why you are depressed.
The only sure thing is: if you do nothing, nothing will change.
