It most definitely is. For years now, the scientific community has issued warnings and raised alarms over the rising stats of depression. Inflation, crime, insecurity, health problems, diseases, famines, political unrest, cyberspace threats, and dozens of other elements have significantly increased the number of people who tend to become depressed due to unfavorable situations. People live a more dynamic and fast-paced lifestyle than their ancestors did, and while this diversity and opportune lifestyle do good to many of us, we cannot say the same for many others.
The number of responsibilities, interactions, and problems has multiplied several times, which has deposited a sizeable burden of expectations and mandates on the average person’s life. The same ropes that tie us to our success and accomplishments in life may very well be the same ones to choke and strangle us when we need a breath of fresh air. The inescapability can be quite harmful to some people, especially when they find no other option than to keep living through stressful and depressive situations, such as war or inflation, or even more personal experiences like divorce or the loss of a pet.Anxiety, on the other hand, seems to take an even more accelerated path than depression. Yes, it is rising, too. In its studies, The Lancet also reported a 25.6% increase in cases of anxiety since the pandemic started. Social isolation, loss of livelihoods, loss of loved ones, the fear of catching the Coronavirus, and the fear of never returning to a normal lifestyle have triggered anxiety symptoms on a massive scale across different age and gender groups in the United States, and also around the globe.
What is more, the immense pressure that the virus brought on our healthcare sector resulted in a compromise on how the healthcare community dealt with other diseases and illnesses.
The bottom line is, the average person is most probably in shambles. Worse than this realization is the idea that there is no single factor we can point out as a definite, consistent origin of depression and anxiety. You may find people who talk about abstract concepts such as peace, restlessness, happiness, materialism, and other ideas. Regardless of their validity and even the spot-on nature of some of these discussions, these ideas do not do much good to the medical dilemmas of mental health in modern times.Depression and anxiety are often cyclic occurrences, and the chances are that if you experience either one of the diseases, you’re probably going to expose yourself to the other as well.
Depression, as the term suggests, refers to depth, lowness, and inactivity. The mental and emotional burden of thoughts and incidents is numbing for the person undergoing a depressive phase, so they completely shut themselves down, occasionally hoping to resurface when the worst is over.
Anxiety follows an opposite path. A person suffering from anxiety tends to actively live through the negative experiences of life, often with heightened sensitivity, which may elicit irrational responses from seemingly ordinary events in life.
While depression and anxiety commonly take place as somewhat permanent phenomena, the person suffering from them may phase in and out of depressive and anxious episodes to counter their opposing effects to reach a state of equilibrium. Once a person feels wrong about overreacting out of anxiety, they may slip into a depressive phase with zero responsiveness and activity, perhaps because they feel bad about reacting earlier or have little to no stamina left for any intense behaviors.Category