Items Tagged With anxiety

I've never been officially diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), partly, I believe, because there have been so many other disorders for my doctors and I to focus on (depression, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Attention Deficit Disorder, anyone?). Looking at the description of GAD, though, I am pretty sure that I have had at least mild anxiety disorder most of my life. I'm definitely a worrier, although I've learned to control it to some extent, and I have had tension knots on my neck since I was a teenager. And I'm really, really bad at relaxing. It's almost impossible for me to relax unless I'm physically exhausted. I used to think that it had something to do with my ADHD, but I'm beginning to think that's not the culprit.

Another tipoff is my nail biting. I've bitten my nails as long as I can remember, down to the quick. I've tried to stop many times, and have even succeeded, sometimes for a year or more, but the majority of my life has been spent with virtually no nails. It took me a long time to figure out why I could stop sometimes and why I couldn't, but I think I've finally hit on it. I think that when I go through periods of heightened anxiety, I start biting my nails again. When I am going through those fairly rare periods of low anxiety, it's a snap to stop.

Read on

A new study examining the results of the STAR*D data has found that people who have “anxious depression” have a more difficult time in treatment than those without. A person with anxious depression experiences a major depressive episode and clinically meaningful levels of anxiety as well. The research examined 2,876 adults who were in treatment for depression in 41 different treatment centers across the U.S. In the first phase of treatment, patients received the antidepressant Celexa (citalopram) to treat their depression.

In the second phase of the study, 1,292 of the patients who didn’t feel significantly less depressed after taking Celexa for up to 14 weeks were then randomly assigned to try a different antidepressant, or to try Celexa combined with another antidepressant.