Disorders

To be occasionally anxious is to be human. But wrestling with anxious thoughts every now and again is a far cry from the symptoms of clinical anxiety.  Below, we explore and define the symptoms, triggers, and warning signs of common anxiety disorders, and more. Being able to recognize anxiety symptoms…

What if you were depressed for so long that you forgot what happiness felt like? What if your low mood started to feel permanent, like part of your personality? This is the reality for many people with dysthymia, or persistent depressive disorder (PDD), a chronic depressive state that lasts two…

Known more commonly and collectively as depression, depressive disorders are a set of closely related mental health conditions that affect a person’s mood, energy, nervous system, sleep cycles, biochemistry, and even brain waves. There’s little in an individual’s daily life that depressive disorders won’t affect—but other than a shared capacity…

Major depression disorder (MDD) is a mental health condition that impacts emotional well-being and can cause severe functional consequences in daily life. MDD is also called clinical depression, major depression, and unipolar depression (to distinguish it from bipolar depression caused by bipolar disorder). In Ancient Greece, depression was called melancholia,…

Experts estimate that less than 2% of the general U.S. population has borderline personality disorder (BPD), but roughly 25% of people claim to have experienced a symptom or two of the condition. For example, most of us have felt emotionally volatile at one point or another. We may have become…

You may wonder why handwriting still matters in an era when we’re all typing on smartphones and computer keyboards. Americans aren’t especially known for their great penmanship. In fact, in 1955 the Saturday Evening Post called the US a “nation of scrawlers.”  But we do still write: at school, on…

Bipolar disorder is a mental disorder characterized by extreme fluctuations in mood. These emotional shifts may take place over the course of hours, weeks, or months, and are often accompanied by drastic changes in behavior and functioning.  There are three main types of bipolar disorder. People with bipolar I (type…

First, let’s clear up one thing: There’s nothing inherently spooky or dangerous about mental health conditions like dissociative identity disorder (split personality) and schizophrenia. But that hasn’t stopped filmmakers from exploiting these conditions again and again in their horror movies. Cinematic depictions of people with mental health disorders can range…

The other day I was watching an Instagram video of a woman’s nose job. (On Instagram, I’m always watching either cosmetic surgery before-and-afters or slow pans around dollhouse interiors.) The woman was adorable. Then she did this time-lapse thing with bandages on her nose and dark circles under her eyes….

What memories are at the forefront when you think back on your pandemic year? Maybe you really got into home workouts, started to bake bread, and found some deep cuts on Netflix you’d never have discovered otherwise. In some ways, maybe it wasn’t so bad for you. But for many…

When you think of picky eaters, what comes to mind? Maybe a toddler who only ever wants chicken nuggets. Or perhaps a young child who refuses to eat vegetables. But what about children who only eat three types of foods and gag at the idea of trying something new? When…

According to the National Survey on Drug Abuse and Health, 9.2 million adults in the United States struggled with substance use disorder and another mental illness (such as an anxiety or mood disorder) in 2018. These statistics show that substance use disorder and other forms of mental illness tend to…