To dislike the casual use of ‘I have anxiety’

[Sallytheseal]

I’ve name changed for this as I’m sure I’ll get a pasting but I’ve noticed SO many threads where the OP will not do something / expect special treatment because ‘I have anxiety’ and that’s the end of the sentence.

Anxiety is a medical condition and it should be treated. It isn’t a reason to just avoid things that make you anxious. For context, I had a traumatic delivery with DC2 and developed debilitating panic attacks. I saw a therapist, had counselling for over 2 years, forced myself to build tolerance (my fear was any separation from DC and I had to build myself up to longer times). It was awful but necessary. DH also suffers from diagnosed anxiety. He has regular therapy and is medicated. He still gets anxious but isn’t part of being a responsible adult getting treatment? I fully understand that doesn’t happen straight away, I didn’t seek help till DC was 6 months and I’m all too familiar with the state of mental health provision but if you already have the awareness that you have anxiety, and that it’s affecting your behaviour, then at some point you need to seek help or at least acknowledge that you need to seek help.

I hate when posters write things like, ‘I can’t confront x, I have anxiety’. I think it belittles people with diagnosed anxiety, as if they are helpless/ unable to change. Also, if you don’t have diagnosed anxiety, it’s weird to use the name of a recognised mental health disorder to self diagnose. You can say ‘I feel anxious’ which doesn’t co-opt someone else’s genuine illness?

I’m honestly not trying to minimise anyone’s suffering but I also don’t think it’s right to misrepresent a mental health disorder.

Anxiety is a medical condition and it should be treated.

Anxiety is a normal human emotion, which everyone experiences at some point - I’d be much more worried about someone who says they never felt anxious about anything.

An anxiety disorder may need treatment but anxiety doesn’t need treatment any more than any other emotion needs treatment. I can’t be doing with medicalisation of normal human reactions to situations.

@JanewaysBun

Yabu just because you're diagnosed doesn't mean you outrank people with undiagnosed anxiety

Or have more right to use the word.

@JanewaysBun

Yabu just because you're diagnosed doesn't mean you outrank people with undiagnosed anxiety

Agreed. I have diagnosed crippling anxiety with cptsd, odc and intrusive thoughts and a healthy dose of depression too. If I want to talk about my anxiety in any context I don't want to have to explain my diagnoses to everyone every time. It's quicker and easier to just say 'I have anxiety'. The reason why 'the world and his mother' have anxiety, diagnosed or otherwise is because we're living in a very human-unfriendly timmr. Expectations of us and are children are beyond what we should be aiming for. Work culture is ridiculous, we are bring governed by monkies. Decimated mental health services and health support generally. How does op and the anxiety-deniers know that all these people claiming anxiety are diagnosed? And anxiety is a very easy condition to diagnoses. Drs give medication for it without even bothering to put a label on it sometimes, a person will go to the GP, list their anxiety symptoms and be handed a prescription for an antidepressant without further discussion.

Anxiety is an emotion as well as a diagnosable mental illness. YABU to want to own usage of the word.

If you haven’t been afraid to leave the house for days on end, or you haven’t had physically devastating panic attacks which have led to you dropping everything and going straight to the doctor/hospital...then you probably don’t have clinical anxiety, you just get nervous and anxious a lot. Unpleasant, but you’re no different to a billion other humans
Totally agree. It's not until I experienced a full on panic attacks that would have sent me running to the hospital if it wasn't for the fact that I totally believed they'd tell me I was dying and preferred to die at home anyway, I didn't fully appreciate what they were.

Giving birth to a very large baby back to back, breaking a bone, 4 lots of surgery in 4 weeks, none of these were as painful as the 3 panic attacks I experienced, not having a clue that's what they were (and therefore wouldn't kill me).

I have had 5 lots of counselling and have been waiting over 10 months for another course of therapy on NHS, I can't afford to pay privately. I am on a very high dose of medication, including diazepam when needed. I still have times when I am unable to get tasks done due to my anxiety, for some people it really is that debilitating. I do think that alot of people say they have mental health conditions when really they are feeling normal emotions that are a bit distressing - but I also think that alot of people have a tendancy to underestimate how badly affected someone can be because they themselves have had a different experience.

YANBU

It's now the go to excuse for any poor behaviour.

Expectations of us and are children are beyond what we should be aiming for
I totally disagree with this. It's not our lives that are becoming harder, on the opposite, it's our lack of resilience in coping with challenges that is the issue.

As a poster recalled of her grandmother's experience, things were much harder for our previous generations but they got on with it and didn't feel half as hard done by by the stress they experienced as we do.

It is because they got in with it that they learned to cope. We however are teaching our kids to walk away from any stressful situation hence magnifying the problem resulting in a large proportion of our generation suffering from anxiety and bring as a ticket to a avoid unpleasant situations.

I completely agree with you. I too am diagnosed as suffering from anxiety and have medication prescribed for panic attacks which are horrendous.

Too many people are now using is as an excuse. I understand things are difficult at the moment but I agree with you. It's over used for trivial things.

I think it's hard to differentiate. My son has ASD is 19 and has had anxiety his whole life in different forms. From generalised anxiety to health anxiety. He isn't medicated though we have worked very very hard over the years on techniques to cope with this and now it's almost an intrinsic part of who he is. Even he will sometimes take the piss of he doesn't want to do something by saying it makes him anxious or learning to drive. I remind him that some level of anxiety is normal and acceptable. I can always tell when he is truly anxious he stops eating yawns co continuously and you can see all the physical symptoms of it. He almost shuts down. It does sometimes become blurred though it isn't always easy to determine on what level I should push him to just deal with that and to know when enough is enough.

I think Worra makes a very good point. One problem is the way it's used to shut down advice to use normal coping mechanisms. So if someone says they're anxious about something you'll engage with them about ways to feel less anxious without just avoiding the situation completely. 'I have anxiety' seems to be used by some people (those without 'medical' anxiety) to shut down discussion of how they might resolve a problem, e.g. through communication, and excuse them just avoiding it. I think that's why the distinction is important on a forum where people ask for advice.

I agree to some extent, but also think people on here might be writing off other people's issues with anxiety just because they think their anxiety trumps all. If that makes sense.

I've struggled for 12 years, and it's honestly taken over my life. Worried about everything, gradually stopped socialising because it just wasn't worth the stress. Finally, finally saw my GP last week and was prescribed meds.

The few people I've talked to about it over the years didn't take it seriously, and would probably have thought I was using the word casually. I am not.

Nobody should be so anxious that they can no longer see their friends, family or enjoy their hobbies that they used to love.

'Using it as an excuse' isn't the same as saying 'I have anxiety'.

There's a lot of blurring on this thread about what people are actually saying, and what meaning the person hearing it infers into it.

It's ok not to do stuff because of anxiety. It doesn't matter whether you have a diagnosis or not. That's what anxiety is for - to tell us there's a risk and to make us think twice/decide against something.

It's not ok to use it (or anything) as an excuse. But those two things are not the same.

I don’t think most people actually know what full blown severe anxiety feels like - I knew what it was to feel anxious but not anxiety until I developed it. It does mean it’s taken less seriously. As someone whose had to be heavily sedated on several occasions it really irritates me too - seems lots of people are very keen to pathologise normal emotions and behaviour and have some kind of label. I also rarely ever use the term “I have anxiety” since it’s lost meaning. I don’t shape my identity around it or post on Facebook about it. I’m getting quite tired of it TBH.

@LovelyLips ANXIETY IS AN EMOTION THAT EVERYONE CAN FEEL AND EXPERIENCE! An Anxiety Disorder is an illness. There is a difference.

Anxiety is an emotion characterized by an unpleasant state of inner turmoil, often accompanied by nervous behavior such as pacing back and forth, somatic complaints, and rumination.[1] It includes subjectively unpleasant feelings of dread over anticipated events.[2][need quotation to verify]

Anxiety is a feeling of uneasiness and worry, usually generalized and unfocused as an overreaction to a situation that is only subjectively seen as menacing.[3] It is often accompanied by muscular tension,[4] restlessness, fatigue and problems in concentration. Anxiety is closely related to fear, which is a response to a real or perceived immediate threat; anxiety involves the expectation of future threat.[4] People facing anxiety may withdraw from situations which have provoked anxiety in the past.[5]

Anxiety disorders differ from developmentally normative fear or anxiety by being excessive or persisting beyond developmentally appropriate periods. They differ from transient fear or anxiety, often stress-induced, by being persistent (e.g., typically lasting 6 months or more), although the criterion for duration is intended as a general guide with allowance for some degree of flexibility and is sometimes of shorter duration in children.[4]

@Saz432

I don’t think most people actually know what full blown severe anxiety feels like - I knew what it was to feel anxious but not anxiety until I developed it. It does mean it’s taken less seriously. As someone whose had to be heavily sedated on several occasions it really irritates me too - seems lots of people are very keen to pathologise normal emotions and behaviour and have some kind of label. I also rarely ever use the term “I have anxiety” since it’s lost meaning. I don’t shape my identity around it or post on Facebook about it. I’m getting quite tired of it TBH.

It pathologises a normal emotion to say that only people with a diagnosed condition can use the word for it.

@Eckhart 👏🏻👏🏻 Yes! Perhaps those with an anxiety disorder should say they have an anxiety disorder rather than just saying they have anxiety. Anxiety as a word has always been used to describe a feeling/emotion/state of mind. You don’t have to have a diagnosed disorder to be allowed to use it.

What often jumps out at me, and its evident on this thread, is how many posters say both them and their children suffer from anxiety.

Is there not an element of learnt behaviour?

Agree with you OP. I have clinically diagnosed anxiety and have had medication and therapy for the last two years. It was debilitating. I missed huge family events and I didn't leave my house for a full year BEFORE lockdown. I get really irked when people are playing a mental health card because they NEED to go to the pub or NEED to go to The Range to buy a "live,laugh, love" canvas. If your anxiety can be solved by going out to buy a gnome, it was never anxiety.

Have diagnosed Anxiety, Depression and was agoraphobic for about a year. While I hate to gatekeep, it is extremely annoying that everyone and their dog seems to say they have anxiety these days. When Infact they are just a bit anxious.

@incywincyspiders I’m sorry to hear that. I have diagnosed anxiety, depression and PTSD. I have been on medication on and off for 13 years. I really don’t see the difference between saying ‘I feel anxiety’ and ‘I feel anxious’. I have no right to tell someone what words they are allowed to use to describe an emotion. At the end of the day, anxiety is still just a noun. An Anxiety Disorder is a diagnosed illness. Perhaps we should start saying we suffer with an anxiety disorder, we have no right to just claim a word and make it off limits to other people.

It's definitely a trend we've seen in university students. Their language is increasingly medicalised. What used to be"I'm a bit nervous about a presentation" has become "I can't do it because I have anxiety". Fine if they have a medical referral but this is 80-90% of students we teach and most do not have actual anxiety at all. I don't think it's that their generarion are more likely to have anxiety, but I think they've been told they do so they align themselves with the rhetoric.

I am finding teenagers are using that word a lot in situations when it suits them.
I work with teenagers. I remember bumping into two if them in the town centre coming out of McDonald's. I asked " my" young person why she wasn't in school and she said ' oh my anxiety is bad' This is now a common excuse for kids who don't want to do something.

I think YABU, OP.

You can only speak for yourself and how you feel and what sort of treatment/intervention works for you or is appropriate for you.

Others have different experiences and I don't think it is for you to judge the level of anxiety that they may be feeling and how it may impact their lives. Just because someone isn't medicated or isn't in receipt of counselling, doesn't mean that their experience of their own anxiety and the impact that it has on their lives and the lives of their families is any less than your own.

I think too people have lost sight of the fact that we’re meant to feel anxious at times, social media particularly gives the impression that we’re always meant to take everything in our stride and never feel uncomfortable or under confident. So the least wobble or discomfort turns into an “anxiety attack”.