Anxiety Disorder Analysis

-14.2 Anxiety Disorders, OCD, and PTSD

In reading chapter 14 (Psychological Disorders), I was interested to review mental disorders from a different perspective than when I took psychology in high school. Back then I was always looking for an explanation as to why I felt certain ways and did certain things. For example, if I thought that I heard or saw something that couldn’t have actually been there, I would automatically suspect that I was having symptoms of schizophrenia. Or if I was happy one day and sad the next, I was most definitely bipolar. In retrospect, I was surely just going through normal teenage emotions and my anxiety no doubt had a factor in my overanalysis of my brain. I have always had rocket high anxiety, more specifically

It wasn’t until middle school that I became extremely introverted and afraid of social contact. I remember that despite having repressed near every memory from fifth and sixth grade, I can recall the paralyzing fear of even having smalltalk with my deskmates, to the point where in seventh and eighth grade people were shocked to hear me have conversation with friends, commenting on how they had never heard me talk so much as in that moment. I was finally diagnosed with severe anxiety and depression in freshman year of high school where I was put on meds, but I always knew that I was different. Everyone around me when I was younger were able to have sleepovers and have inseparable best friends while I got anxious from direct eye contact. Sometimes I wonder If finally being diagnosed made me almost seem more normal. I wasn’t afraid of being judged and humiliated without reason anymore, but rather was validated that I wasn’t alone in my awkwardness. I think that the realization that I wasn’t as different as I had previously thought helped me heal more than therapy ever did or ever

This news wasn’t exactly news to me, as the year that preceded the diagnosis was one of my darkest, but certainly scared my mom enough to do everything that she could to make me happier. I’d say that eighth grade to sophomore year of highschool was the time where depression hit me the hardest. Unlike now, where depressive episodes are less frequent and are composed of shorter amounts of time, back then they lasted months at a time and left me unable to get out of bed and perform normal functions. I spent so long trying to identify the exact point in time that triggered the start of having these episodes, but have in retrospect come to understand that not just one thing happened to make me depressed nor was this illness just in my genes. Rather I've come to the conclusion that my mental illnesses are a result of a combination of nature and