Anxiety Disorders
Anxiety disorders involve excessive apprehension, worry, and fear. People with generalized anxiety disorder experience constant anxiety about routine events in their lives. Phobias are fears of specific objects, situations, or activities. Panic disorder is an anxiety disorder in which people experience sudden, intense terror and such physical symptoms as rapid heartbeat and shortness of breath. People with obsessive-compulsive disorder experience intrusive thoughts or images (obsessions) or feel compelled to perform certain behaviors (compulsions). People with post-traumatic stress disorder relive traumatic events from their past and feel extreme anxiety and distress about the event. (Anxiety Disorders, Mood Disorders, Mental Illness)
Mood Disorders
Mood disorders, also called affective disorders, create disturbances in a person’s emotional life. Depression, mania, and bipolar disorder are examples of mood disorders. Symptoms of depression may include feelings of sadness, hopelessness, and worthlessness, as well as complaints of physical pain and changes in appetite, sleep patterns, and energy level. In mania, on the other hand, an individual experiences an abnormally elevated mood, often marked by exaggerated self-importance, irritability, agitation, and a decreased need for sleep. In bipolar disorder, also called manic-depressive illness, a person’s mood alternates between extremes of mania and depression. (Anxiety Disorders, Mood Disorders, Mental Illness)
These positron emission tomography scans of the brain of a person with bipolar disorder show the individual shifting from depression, top row, to mania, middle row, and back to depression, bottom row, over the course of 10 days. Blue and green indicate low levels of brain activity, while red, orange, and yellow indicate high levels of brain activity. (Anxiety Disorders, Mood Disorders, Mental Illness)
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