Are depression and anorexia nervosa related?
Depression is a disorder that can affect anybody at any time in life. It is most often associated as one of the symptoms people with anorexia nervosa has to face and deal with. The symptoms of depression can manifest at the same time when you have been sick for several weeks.
Are eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa related to depression? The answer is a big yes! Depression and anorexia come together hand in hand. Depression can trigger your eating disorder in the first place or you may have gone into depression resulting from the effects that anorexia has had on you.
The person suffering from anorexia can be suffering from depression at the same time. He or she usually feels symptoms of worthlessness, hopelessness and self hatred. Depression and anorexia robs a person of happiness and self worth and can easily wreak chaos on innocent lives.
A loss of a loved one can trigger a major emotional crisis. When a death takes place, you may experience a wide range of emotions. Many people who suffers from depression report feeling an initial stage of numbness when the realization of death sets in.
You may experience some emotions including:
Denial
Disbelief
Confusion
Shock
Sadness
Yearning
Anger
Humiliation
Despair
Guilt
The forms of depression
Depression is known to be of three different forms, normal, mild, and severe.
Normal depression - This is a natural reaction to the loss of a loved one. It caused sadness, lethargy, and in some serious cases is grief to the point of loss of appetite, insomnia, anger, obsessive thought about the loved one who passed away. The difference of a normal depression from other forms is that most people eventually recover and resume to their typical moods after encountering normal depression. When the mood of the person do not lift and instead lingers, then mild depression sets in.
Mild depression - When a person become chronically depressed, holds low self esteem, and has some symptoms of severe depression, then they are considered to have mild depression. A person with mild depression can still function in daily living. It is hard, however, for them to beat “the blues” Often, the mildly depressed person has nothing to do to be accountable for their altered mood. A person progresses to mild depression when his or her moods do not lift and instead continues.
Severe depression - When a person has a severe depression, he or she feels utterly hopeless and feels such great sorrow resulting to lost interest in life. It causes the person to be incapable to rouse out of bed. The more you try to encourage the severely depressed person to do activities, the person feels anxious, irritable, agitated, and chronic indecisiveness. Similar to mild depression, severe depression often does not sink in after a traumatic event or the loss of a loved one. Intense feelings of grief, guilt, and unworthiness are experienced just the same like the other forms of depression. Untreated depression has an estimated 25% depressed persons try to kill themselves after 5 years of suffering from the chronic mood disorder.
What triggers depression to happen?
The question on finding out which triggered what ends up similar to a game whether egg or chicken comes first. The most important thing is to determine the main cause that triggers the depression currently.
The feelings of helplessness and hopelessness from anorexia can easily aggravate somebody’s moods. The person suffering from an eating disorder feels helpless like spiraling out of control, while desperately searching for control or starvation or purging. These people equate self worthiness to losing enough weight as their ultimate goal.
Approach in treatments
It is a sad reality that we are living in a “pill society” where therapists tend to treat depression alone with drug therapy instead of a more psychological basis. Just like other disorders, depression must be treated along with the eating disorder. Often depression treatment includes Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) that identifies the ten forms of distorted thinking found in depression. Apart from CBT, drug intervention consisting of anti-depressants are used. It includes the famous Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil. It is known that a person generally progress well when placed under a medical therapy but depression resurfaces and relapse into old thinking patterns once drugs are discontinued. A very promising result form studies show that depressed people when treated along with CBT are weened off from anti depressants without many problems. The success is attributed to better rationalization techniques along with the use of drugs as a “booster” but not the main part of the treatment. In the end, the person undergoing treatment will learn how to rationalize and use logic to rise above the problems thus no longer needing anti depressants.
Tags: anti depressant drugs, cognitive behavioral therapy cbt, eating disorder, relationship of depression anorexia nervosa