Mental illnesses, just like any other kind of illness, don’t necessarily come in tidy single file. Sometimes more than one thing can be happening at a time, and it helps to have a mental health professional on your team while you’re identifying what’s going on and how best to treat it. Here’s an excerpt from a PsychCentral article in which one bipolar woman shares her experience of having anxiety mixed with depression. If any element of this rings a bell for you, and you live in northeastern Ohio, we hope you’ll reach out.
Since I’ve been diagnosed with bipolar illness (1991), I’ve lived in lots of “states” — I’ve been high; I’ve been low; I’ve existed in a horrible mixed state of high (mania) and low (depression), in which the key emotions were anger and irritability.
But recently, I experienced a new state–depression mixed with anxiety, and let me tell you, this might have been the most debilitating state of all.
Usually, when I get depressed, I’m just sad, or when I’m really low, I feel a complete lack of emotion.
But again, a few months ago, I experienced a new kind of depression–anxious depression. In this state, I lost all of my confidence. I was completely off my “game.” I was edgy, scared and, of course, sad.
Little things threw me for a proverbial loop. I feared I was ineffectual at work and that I was going to lose my teaching job. My mind leapt to every worst case scenario imaginable. For instance, I had to fail a student, and suddenly, I was afraid she was going to commit suicide because I’d given her a low grade. Of course, the student was not going to do anything like this, but my mind feared the worst.