Types of Mental Health Conditions
Terry Ashmore
UK manufacturer of furniture & soft furnishings supporting care groups & interior designers
Mental health is now taken very seriously thanks to increasing public awareness. Most mental health conditions can be treated through medication or cognitive behavioural therapy and there are plenty of support groups and charities there to help.
Some are hereditary and some are triggered by stressful events. Below are just some of the mental health conditions that are recognised today.
Common types of mental health conditions
It's estimated that around a quarter of people in the UK?experience some form of mental health problem each year, with 70-75% of those never receiving treatment. Here are some of the most common types of mental health conditions:
Anxiety disorder
People with anxiety disorder feel extreme fear or stress about everyday events. They often worry excessively, thinking obsessively about everything that could go wrong in a situation.
This can stop them from doing things they enjoyed before they developed anxiety, such as refusing to ride a rollercoaster just in case it breaks down or giving up swimming because they strongly fear drowning.
While these bad events are possible, someone with anxiety can worry to the extent where they feel that the worst-case scenario is the most likely one.
Social anxiety
People with social anxiety can feel extreme fear and worry about social situations. They struggle with thoughts that they will do or say the wrong thing, that everybody is judging them negatively and that they will embarrass themselves.
This can lead to extremely low self-esteem.
Panic attacks
Back when humans were hunter-gatherers, their bodies used ‘fight or flight’ response to help them when they were in danger. We still have this physical response when presented with extreme fear, which is why people with anxiety can suffer regularly from what we now call panic attacks.
When someone is having a panic attack, their heart can thump rapidly, they may start shaking and sweating, and they often cannot think straight. Panic attacks don’t usually last long but it can take a while to calm down.
OCD
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is a form of anxiety disorder. It’s when somebody has compulsions to undertake certain actions and rituals to alleviate their worries.
A common fear in people with OCD is germs, which leads to obsessive cleaning or hand washing. People with OCD very often have to conduct certain rituals before they can relax.
They might check switches and locks a certain amount of times before they go to bed, or have a fixation on numbers being lucky or unlucky. These rituals can be very time consuming, but the person cannot ignore their compulsive thoughts that something bad will happen if they don’t complete the routine, even if they don’t really believe it.
PTSD
Post-traumatic stress disorder is an anxiety disorder developed after a traumatic event. Symptoms could start immediately or even years later, and include panicking, self-destructive behaviour, avoidance, physical or emotional numbness, flashbacks and nightmares, to name a few.
It’s thought that up to a fifth of soldiers develop PTSD.
Phobias
A phobia is an extreme and overwhelming fear, and a type of anxiety disorder. Rather than being anxious in general, a person with phobias will be terrified of something very specific and often experience panic attacks or even be physically sick when faced with it.
They cannot control this fear without treatment, and may feel it’s irrational in their mind but cannot stop their body’s response. Phobias can range from common types, such as arachnophobia (fear of spiders) and claustrophobia (fear of confined spaces) to rare ones like pogonophobia (fear of beards).
Depression
Depression is prolonged and extreme sadness that sufferers cannot control. It is a crippling mental illness that can affect people’s ability to eat, sleep, work and interact with others. They often feel like they will never be happy again or that their life is not worth living.
The soul-sucking dementors in?Harry Potter?were famously based on JK Rowling’s experience of depression.
Bipolar disorder
People with bipolar disorder have extreme moods that last for weeks, months or even years. These moods tend to swing between depression and mania, when they are euphoric and full of energy.
When these moods are very extreme they can also cause hallucinations or delusions, as well as erratic behaviour. People with bipolar disorder do not necessarily always have extreme feelings, they can spend long periods of time with milder or neutral moods.
SAD
Seasonal Affective Disorder is when people suffer depression at a certain time of year. The most common form is depression in the winter and is thought to be from a lack of sunlight.
A rarer form is Reverse SAD, when people become depressed in the summer, possibly due to overexposure to sunlight.
Reverse SAD can be more difficult to manage because everybody is expected to be happy when the sun comes out, so other people’s joy at the very thing that is making the person with Reverse SAD miserable, and their inability to understand that the sufferer is not choosing to feel down, can be extremely isolating.
Likewise, people with Reverse SAD can feel exhilarated in autumn and winter but have to deal with people moaning about the weather and not wanting to go outside with them.
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Postnatal depression
Postnatal depression can happen to both women and men after the arrival of a new baby. Around 10 per cent of women experience it, and may struggle to bond with their baby or even feel that they are not a good mother for feeling this way.
Having postnatal depression does not mean that somebody doesn’t love their baby or that they are incapable of caring for them.
Eating disorders
Eating disorders are characterised by irregular, obsessive or uncontrollable thoughts or behaviours around food. These can be centred around body image but sometimes they are emotional or habitual. People with eating disorders find it very difficult to eat normally without experiencing stress, panic or compulsive thoughts.
This can result in people isolating themselves, such as finding it easier not to attend social events than be obliged to eat foods or quantities that they are not comfortable with.
Anorexia
The most well-known eating disorder, anorexia nervosa, is a fixation on slimming and controlling food intake that results in self-starvation. It is most common in teenage girls but can affect men and women of all ages.
People with anorexia develop a fear of eating any type or quantity of food that they believe will make them gain weight. They often strive to be what is medically severely underweight and develop strict rules around eating, such as having a list of ‘safe’ foods that they will allow themselves to eat.
They also usually have compulsive rules around exercise, often over-exercising to burn calories or relieve the guilt of eating a food they believe they shouldn’t have. Anorexia can cause malnutrition and even death.
Bulimia
Bulimia nervosa is when people habitually make themselves sick after eating to get rid of the food. Usually somebody with bulimia will binge eat, then purge so that the body cannot digest the food and process the calories.
As with all eating disorders, bulimia is not always about body image, it can be a method of control when they are feeling out of control of the rest of their lives, such as in their work life, love life or personal life.
Bulimia can lead to malnutrition, as well as rotten teeth or a torn oesophagus from frequent vomiting.
Compulsive and binge eating
These are two different disorders, but both involve the compulsion to overeat. People with a compulsive eating disorder feel out of control of how much they eat.
They will often find themselves grazing all day, constantly seeking out food even if they are not hungry. Binge eating disorder is when somebody regularly eats a huge amount of food in one sitting.
Often this will be planned, the person will go and buy a large amount of food and plan what order they will eat it in. Both of these disorders can cause people to be overweight or obese.
Orthorexia
Orthorexia nervosa is an extreme obsession with healthy eating. Someone with orthorexia may not necessarily have a healthy diet, but believe that what they eat is best for their body, even if nutritional advice says otherwise.
They can be fixated on the 'purity’ of foods and refuse to eat anything they consider toxic, such as processed food. A common symptom is cutting out whole food groups, often because of hour upon hour of research, and many people self-diagnose food intolerances.
People with orthorexia often believe that eating something not on their list of safe foods, even as a treat, will inevitably make them ill. This disorder can lead to malnutrition.
Personality disorders
People with personality disorders think and feel differently to others. They can process emotions differently or analyse conversations and situations incorrectly.
Some people with personality disorders have difficulty understanding other people’s actions and points of view.
Narcissistic personality disorder
People with narcissistic personality disorder have an exaggerated sense of self-importance and self-worth. They may believe they are more intelligent, beautiful or important than most people and be convinced that others are jealous of them.
They usually lack empathy and constantly bully or belittle others, but will be unable to comprehend that they are wrong or anything but the victim in a dispute. They do not deal well with failure and look for somebody else to blame if something goes wrong for them.
Dependent personality disorder
Those with dependent personality disorder are emotionally dependent on other people and dislike being alone. They sometimes cling to one person at a time throughout their lives, such as a best friend at school who they then abandon when they get a romantic partner and cling to them instead.
They often look to that person to form their opinions and beliefs and make decisions for them while having few ideas of their own. They want to spend all their time with that person and get jealous of the person seeing anybody else.
People with this disorder are often oversensitive to criticism from others but will accept abuse from the person they are dependent on.
Schizophrenia
People with schizophrenia experience delusions or hallucinations, which could be auditory or visual. They find it difficult to establish what is really happening in their world and what is a trick of the mind.
Around one per cent of the population has some form of schizophrenia.
Paranoid schizophrenia
This is the most common type of schizophrenia. As well as experiencing hallucinations and delusions, someone with paranoid schizophrenia will form strong beliefs that may or may not be caused by the hallucinations.
For example, they may be absolutely convinced that a family member has a vendetta against them because they have hallucinated overhearing conversations to suggest as such.