Anxiety morphing to depression--cool.

Today I left the house and was noticeably and significantly less anxious. This would be great if it wasn't replaced with something just as debilitating: depression. How many of you have experienced a shift from anxiety predominated symptoms to depressive ones? Is there no hope or no end to this immense torment?

I agree with SC. Anxiety and Depression do go hand in hand...sometimes one is stronger than the other. But they are experienced together often. I wouldn't try to seperate the two..or be discouraged if you experience them together. It is quite common to have both. It's probably better not to overanalyze the symptoms you have.

Not sure if it's acceptable to place a pseudo "addendum" onto another's post, but I'm going to attempt it.

I have a long and complicated family history as well, with a mixed bag of goodies, combined with another mixed bag of accelerants.

I also spent what I'll refer to as most of my life (because I recall instances of being at an extremely young age, under 3 years old) where my behaviour would start to manifest in what probably now-a-days wouldn't ignored. (Mine was swept under the carpet and stomped on to try and flatten it out).

This did leave me with decades of fighting depression, anxiety, mood disorders, and combinations of all of the above.

I wasn't raised by my birth Mother either (add to the pile)...and to the defiance of all those textbooks claiming otherwise, I never forgave and never moved on.

So what does this have to do with your post? Simply that,...right now, at this point in my life, and I am 51, I've only begun to get a handle on all those years of....of whatever they were, and were not. An only child left me, also, a prime target for all sorts of feelings.

So yes, anxiety and depression and mood disorders can not only take the place of one another, they can coexist together, and even jumble their position about.

What I am learning to do (because I still have an issue or two I've not come to peace with, I doubt many children would),....is rather than try to eliminate and eradicate those feelings I deemed "negative" from my life, I'm learning to understand them, re-label them, assign them a different source, and replace their power, thereby reducing their size (to me) and thus their impact.

My whole family felt that unless you were getting ECT/EST, and getting admitted (often without the patient's consent) to what was then referred to as a "mental asylum," everything else was bunk and froo-froo snake oil, and mental disorders were ignored, denied, lied about, and the person making any such claim was severely punished for "making up such lies"....

Well....we see how that manifested.

I sincerely, and genuinely, am not intending to hijack your thread. So please accept my apologies. I got carried away, but my point remains,....that when there's an undercurrent of these feelings, and yes, they absolutely do co-exist, as one gets less attention and gets properly dealt with, our minds/bodies sometimes feel this is the perfect opportunity for the other one/s to surface because now there's room!

You're not abnormal. Your situation is not abnormal. All the things you observe and witness are absolutely within the realms of what can be expected, and along those lines, they're also things that can be dealt with. I'd be a tad more surprised if you didn't notice these switcheroos taking place!

I bucked my family system, and chose to see a psychiatrist, psychotherapist,.....there are,...honest to God,....ways out and around these things!






M.