Q & A Mental health with – Dr Sharad Man Tamrakar
Since the past seven months, I have always been getting negative feelings in my mind. I always worry about my health, and feel like something is going to happen to me and that I am going to die soon. Because of these feelings, my life is totally disturbed. I don't feel like going anywhere or talking to anyone. I often feel dizzy, have headache and sweat heavily at all times. Can you please suggest what's wrong with me? –Ram
You are suffering from Anxiety Disorder, which is one of the most prevalent causes for psychological distress with a life time prevalence rate of 15 percent. All the symptoms you have mentioned are classical phenomenon of the “disease of worry”. If they are free floating throughout the day, then it would be Generalised Anxiety Disorder, and if they come in spurts, suddenly peaking in a matter of seconds to minutes and terminating in complete relief, then it falls into the category of Panic Disorder.
From evolutionary point of view, every living creature is inherently instilled with “Fight-n-Flight” reaction to face or ward off danger. Certain amount of fear and worry is essential to prepare for danger and future, and for human species as a whole this concern drives us to civilisation and technological advancement. It is when this fear and worry becomes overwhelming that it turns into anxiety, compromising one's social, occupational and other significant activities of life. In its clinical form, symptoms are not only limited to mental worry, but are manifested in physical forms like dizziness, palpitation, perspiration, wobbliness, shakiness, trembling, restlessness and ‘tension headaches’.
Cognitively, worry about health and death is present in everybody, but when one is anxious, it occupies the forefront of our thinking and dominates all our activities. A person gets more than ten thousand thoughts in 24 hours, but we merely execute a few hundreds. Which thoughts are executed depends on our mood state. In anxiety one tends to pay more attention to worrying thoughts. And another “thinking error” is that the anxious person tends to believe that whatever catastrophic thoughts comes into the mind, including those in the dreams, will get executed in the real life, which is not possible because time is simply inadequate for all those thousands of thoughts to manifest in reality.
You are suffering from Anxiety Disorder, which is one of the most prevalent causes for psychological distress with a life time prevalence rate of 15 percent. All the symptoms you have mentioned are classical phenomenon of the “disease of worry”. If they are free floating throughout the day, then it would be Generalised Anxiety Disorder, and if they come in spurts, suddenly peaking in a matter of seconds to minutes and terminating in complete relief, then it falls into the category of Panic Disorder.From evolutionary point of view, every living creature is inherently instilled with “Fight-n-Flight” reaction to face or ward off danger. Certain amount of fear and worry is essential to prepare for danger and future, and for human species as a whole this concern drives us to civilisation and technological advancement. It is when this fear and worry becomes overwhelming that it turns into anxiety, compromising one's social, occupational and other significant activities of life. In its clinical form, symptoms are not only limited to mental worry, but are manifested in physical forms like dizziness, palpitation, perspiration, wobbliness, shakiness, trembling, restlessness and ‘tension headaches’.
Cognitively, worry about health and death is present in everybody, but when one is anxious, it occupies the forefront of our thinking and dominates all our activities. A person gets more than ten thousand thoughts in 24 hours, but we merely execute a few hundreds. Which thoughts are executed depends on our mood state. In anxiety one tends to pay more attention to worrying thoughts. And another “thinking error” is that the anxious person tends to believe that whatever catastrophic thoughts comes into the mind, including those in the dreams, will get executed in the real life, which is not possible because time is simply inadequate for all those thousands of thoughts to manifest in reality.
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