You're just anxious, you dont 'have anxiety' stop it.

[GreenyEye]

Anxiety is a diagnosable medical condition.

Being anxious is normal, everyone gets anxious/worried.

Anxiety is when it takes over your life and affects your ability to function day to day, when it becomes abnormal.

AIBU to tell people to stop saying you 'have anxiety' unless you have actually seen a Dr or someone professionally qualified to diagnose it.

You're making it much harder for those of us with medically recognised Anxiety Disorder to be taken seriously.

Do give over deary

We didn't get a formal diagnosis for dd because it involved a long wait for CAMHS - we got a referral from our GP and were on the waiting list to be seen (no doubt would have got the rubber stamping diagnosis you seem to think is so imperative) but grew inpatient, and I paid privately for dd to see a psychologist with a specialism in helping young people.

I agree that most reasonably intelligent people can discern the difference between just feeling anxious occasionally from the mental health condition.

It is abundantly clear that to me that my dd suffers with anxiety - an in particular severe and debilitating social anxiety which adversely affects many aspects of her life (and because I am her mother, mine too)

Maybe instead of getting narky about other people's 'fake' anxiety devaluing your own 'real' anxiety, we should all be asking why so many people do have anxiety these days and focus on ways to come up with solutions to that

Nailed it.

I do agree with this to some extent. It is similar to use of the word “depressed” at the moment.

People get sad and down, it is part of life, in the same way that everyone feels anxious sometimes - often as a normal response to stressful events.

It is not the same as clinical depression, where a person can struggle to even get out of bed and is having thoughts of ending it all due to feeling like a burden.

Lots of normal human emotions are classed as ‘mental health’ these days.

I haven't dished one of these out for a while....

they're not EC22, thats the point.

Normal emotions, anxious, sad...etc are not mental health conditions.

When those emotions become so consuming and magnified that they leave you unable to function normally, then they become MH conditions.

Its people declaring they have anxiety or they're depressed when in fact they're just a bit worried or a bit down that creates beliefs like yours.

I have anxiety - I am also anxious.

I was undiagnosed other than the massive amounts of continuous, non-stop, cortisol, coursing through my veins having caused me to have a heart attack. I am now on medication - both for my anxiety and my heart.

Anxiety kills - see a doctor if you suffer.

@postercatyrosetom2 a classic case of not reading a post. I asked what it was called - I didn't proclaim no one suffered from it.

Always good to read a message thoroughly before posting.

rubber stamping diagnosis

No medical diagnosis is “rubber stamping”
Your complete disdain for the difficulty and knowledge required to practice medicine is breathtaking.

I hadn't considered the physiological effects of the cortisol.

Depression isn’t an emotion - feeling sad is part of it, but by far not the only part. I think that is where some people get confused - “I feel very sad, therefore I have depression.

Depression can have a life of its own entirely and just show up, again and again, throughout a person’s life, even when life is going wonderfully well. There doesn’t have to be a reason.

In the same way, some people go through heartbreaking and difficult events, but they do not become clinically depressed.

25 years ago my anxiety was diagnosed as me being clinically neurotic.

HTH.

It was only reclassified as Anxiety when it got so bad it developed into PND 10 years ago.

When those emotions become so consuming and magnified that they leave you unable to function normally, then they become MH conditions.

Sorry but you are talking absolute dangerous nonsense. I work in MH. All areas of the pathway are important to treat, including mild cases of anxiety and depression. You don't solve the issue by only treating the extreme cases.

Can I please ask a genuine question if anyone can help me? Sorry to hijack the post but the mental health forum has been fairly quiet whenever I've posted.
I'm suffering from postnatal depression and am taking medication for it. So far I have periods where I have a little more motivation and I no longer wake up thinking 'I can't believe I have to go through another day.'
But I'm afraid of leaving the house or going anywhere now, it fills me with dread and I avoid it as much as possible. Even getting fuel for the car this morning felt horrible. Is this a part of the depression or separate?

OP are you annoyed that other people recover from self-diagnosed periods of anxiety easily/quickly yet you suffer from chronic anxiety you can't 'shake off'?

Do you feel judged by these people that you can't just get over it, simultaneously feeling they have no idea what a true anxiety disorder feels like?

I do find it irritating in general when people insist on medicalising what are in fact perfectly normal human conditions, because it downgrades the experiences of people who really are unwell. I would agree that people who say they 'suffer from anxiety' when they mean they get a bit nervous about going to a party or doing a presentation at work are misleading people, just like people who say 'I'm a bit OCD' when they just mean they're fussy about tidiness.

I have a friend who has attached a medical label to virtually every personality trait she has, and currently claims to be autistic and to have anxiety, PTSD, dyspraxia and a number of phobias. She has been diagnosed with precisely none of these things (in fact she has been told by three separate specialists that she is not autistic). She decided she must be dyspraxic when she found that I am, but she has literally none of the signs or symptoms or problems associated with it - I'm not exaggerating here, I seriously mean none.

I have now noticed on social media that she is talking to a lot of people with ADD and has now decided she has that too - again, no diagnosis.

Diy2019 postnatal depression and anxiety often go hand in hand, it sounds like you have both

All areas of the pathway are important to treat, including mild cases of anxiety and depression. You don't solve the issue by only treating the extreme cases.

Indeed.

I don't know why we get so many threads like this. Surely anybody who is struggling deserves support (if available)? I have an extremely anxious 8 year old. I wouldn't say that she has an anxiety disorder, but I am still going to do everything I can to support her when she is having a bad time.

@diy2019 - I would say, based just on my own experience of coming through depressions, that is part of it. I hope you start feeling so much better soon - hang in there.

My experience of getting better is that it doesn’t come all at once - it is a case of sometimes having a slightly better day, even if the next day is bad again. Then maybe two days in one week that aren’t so bad, then an actual good day that takes you by surprise... then one day you look back and realise you have had more okay days in a week, and so on. Rather than a point where it all gets better in one go.

I think it's the terminology that's confusing.

As PP's have said, if someone "has anxiety" they have a long-term illness that can significantly impact their quality of life.

If, however, they "feel/are anxious" about something specific, they don't have an illness. It doesn't mean that they're not suffering, but it's a temporary emotional reaction.

It's the difference between "having clinical depression" and "feeling depressed." I felt depressed after my Mum died, but I didn't have the illness depression. Some people have the illness PND, while others feel depressed from lack of sleep/caring for a newborn, but they're not ill.

That's how I see it anyway.

I'm not even sure if I have a specific anxiety diagnosis or not, the gp never said.
Doesn't stop it happening, one of the various side effects of the condition I suffer from.
And it's not due to "worry". I'm not anxious about anything, I just feel really revved up and shaky and strange.

I agree with your sentiment OP.

There's a big difference between being anxious about something and having anxiety.

I find the almost constant use of "I have anxiety" rather than "I am feeling anxious about X" really tedious.

Anxiety manifests itself differently in people and tbh I'm not overly fussed about people being medically diagnosed.

Rather it's the language being used to allude to being nervous/anxious about a specific event/situation in someone whose MH is otherwise fine, as opposed to someone who suffers from an almost constant level of anxiety in all aspects of their life.

The latter is constraining and debilitating. The former is simply normal life.

And @ilovemushroomsoup, what would you describe as ‘mild depression’?

And that is a genuine question. I have wondered that before. My experiences of depression have always been so debilitating, that I have wondered how someone would know that they are ‘mildly’ depressed, and what it might feel like ?

There are always people who act selfishly because they need to ‘put their MH first’ or because they ‘suffer with anxiety’

Meanwhile loads of people with diagnosed and treated MH conditions soldier on without complaining.

Is it selfish to prioritise mental health? Perhaps by acting protectively, they are avoiding a deterioration to a worse or diagnosable condition. That just sounds like effective mental health self care.

Any anyone with anxiety should have access to support, so there shouldn't be a need to "soldier on without complaining". That's a resource issue, not because some one has allegedly and unfairly described themselves as anxious when other's think it isn't sufficient.

There shouldn't be a hierarchy of suffering, but all this seems very competitive.