Hi guys, and welcome to part two of Understanding Anxiety Disorders. My name is Gilles Brideau and I am a hypnotist, coach and psychotherapist that lives and works in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada.
We’re just going to continue our discussion we had finished last on Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and the loop that creates it.
This time we’re going to cover a little more about PTSD. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a type of anxiety disorder and it can occur after the person has witnessed a traumatic event that caused serious injury or death. This is one of the areas that I specialize in in working with first responders here in my practice. This is an area I’m very familiar with. What the person usually struggles with is this reoccurring thoughts or nightmares about what happened during the event. One of the most common criteria is just that they have this serious difficulty in sleeping, falling asleep. Sometimes there’s changes in appetite, but they experience anxiety, fear, especially when exposed to situations that are reminiscent of the trauma. That could be as simple as by driving past the area which they had the trauma.
For certain, the paramedics that I work with, if they had an incident on a certain street they have great difficulty going past that street and not experiencing the physical symptomatology of anxiety and distress. Oftentimes they’re on edge, jumpy, they can become very startled easily. It’s like they’re on hyper-alert all the time. They often have very low energy. It can really affect their mood in terms of being sad. Staying on task, memory problems, memory difficulties is also very common. It’s like there’s always interference with the brain from the old past events.
The common thing that they talked about is just this feeling of being scattered, that they have difficulty focusing on anything. It’s like their attention is all over the place. They can’t really focus on one thing. Things get overwhelming really quickly, even simple daily tasks that they used to do really well. They become much more hesitant in terms of making any big time decisions. They just become very hesitant in doing so when they were always take-charge before. Obviously with all of the symptomatology, you get frustrated, you get agitated, you get angry because you’re just not really yourself.
The last component is just this feeling of apathy, just feeling numb. They’ve become totally detached from their emotions. It just feels like they’re going through the motions and feeling disconnected from those that typically would really matter.
Now there’s a real co-existence that exists between both depression and anxiety. About 50% of the people with anxiety disorders also experience depression. You see the link between the two here in this graph. In anxiety there’s a hyper-arousal and with depression there’s a lack of enjoyment, but between the two is this general distress. Now, probably the best way I can illustrate that is I had a client who came in who had gotten the diagnosis of depression, but when I looked at his scores on a tool that I use in my office it was actually his anxiety that was so much higher. I said, “How does your anxiety play into the depression?” Although he wanted to dismiss the fact that there was some anxiety there because he said, “Well, I have depression. I don’t have anxiety.” I said, “No, I understand that because you got a diagnosis from a physician. I get that, but how do they interplay?”
He’s like, “Well, a good example I can give you is this morning I wanted to go to our local coffee shop, our local Tim Horton’s to get a coffee, and because there was a line up there I was so stressed out. I was thinking what other people were thinking about me and all that kind of stuff. My negative thoughts led me to just think really negatively about myself, like, ‘That’s why you’re such a loser. That’s why you can’t be home. That’s why you don’t have a girlfriend. That’s why you have trouble maintaining a job.'” It really led to him feeling really low about himself. We talked about the fact if we could use some strategies to tackle your anxiety, how do you think that will impact your depression? It was like a flash of insight, like, “Maybe I’ve been addressing the wrong thing all along.”
I said, “No, no, I mean, you’ve been diagnosed with that. It doesn’t mean that it’s not there, but if we start tackling the anxiety a little bit more effectively, maybe it can alleviate some of the symptoms of depression that you may have, because of those automatic thoughts that you’re having.” That was really enlightening for him. Know that with depression and anxiety, if you take cognitive behavioral, I think there’s 50 different techniques to deal with anxiety and depression. CBT is actually the best practices approach in dealing with anxiety, but it’s really any kind of exposure or exposure-type of therapy. That could be EMDR. That could be hypnosis. It could be a lot of things that help a person overcome that anxiety.
That’s it. That’s my message for today. I hope that this has been helpful, beneficial to you. Like I said, I’m going to do a follow up video about treatment in the weeks to come. Look forward to that. Thanks for joining me today. I would love to hear from you. I’d like to answer questions that you may have as it pertains to anxiety or any other issue or concern that you may have. I’d love to hear from you. With that, thanks so much for joining me today. Have a wonderful day.