EA - Understanding the two most common mental health problems in the world by spencerg

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Understanding the two most common mental health problems in the world, published by spencerg on July 7, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Co-authored with Amanda MetskasThis is a linkpost from ClearerThinking.org. We've included some excerpts of the article below, but you can read the full post here.Chances are, your life has been impacted by anxiety disorders or depression, either through your direct experience or through the impact they have had on your loved ones. Anxiety and depression are the two most common mental health conditions in the world, but they are frequently misunderstood.Previous EA Mental Health surveys (2023, 2021, and 2018) have also highlighted the importance of these topics to people in the community who take the surveys.In this data-based essay, we aim to help you better understand anxiety and depression, as well as the hidden links between them. By improving your understanding of these disorders, you may find it easier to recognize anxiety and depression in yourself and be more effective at supporting people in your life who experience these conditions. This infographic summarizes some of our interesting findings about the differences and similarities between anxiety and depression (click here to see the infographic at full size).The scale of both anxiety and depression is vast: the World Health Organization estimates that 301 million people worldwide suffer from an anxiety disorder, and 280 million people worldwide suffer from depression. Worldwide, depression ranks as the second largest cause of disability, and anxiety ranks eighth, according to analyses of the most recent Global Burden of Disease study. And yet, despite their prevalence and severe impacts, humanity’s scientific understanding has a substantial way to go to fully understand and highly reliably treat these conditions. Improved treatment and management techniques could make a huge difference in the quality of life of hundreds of millions of people around the world. These astounding statistics have motivated us to run our own studies investigating how these conditions work and how they relate to each other. This article will explain what we found!Overlapping DisordersA major obstacle to understanding anxiety and depression is that they often go together - many people who experience one also experience the other. Approximately 45% of people who experience a depressive disorder in their lifetime also experience an anxiety disorder, and these often occur during the same timeframe. Among people with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, about 43% of them will also experience depression in their lifetime. In one of our own studies, we found that commonly used measures of anxiety and depression (the GAD7 and PHQ9 scales) had shockingly high correlations (r=0.82). These strong links between anxiety and depression can make it more difficult to disentangle how each of these disorders works and make it more difficult for a person with anxiety and depression to effectively manage their conditions. Some people even think they have an anxiety disorder when it's more accurate to say they have a depressive disorder or the reverse.The co-occurrence of anxiety and depression is a bit puzzling because they almost seem like opposites when experienced in the moment. A high level of anxiety often feels like being “wound up” - muscle tension, rapid heart rate, and chest tightness are among the most common physical symptoms. People experiencing anxiety may have a nervous energy that makes it difficult for them to relax, even if there is nothing they can practically do to address whatever is making them anxious. Depression, on the other hand, often feels like struggling to muster energy or motivation to care about things enough to take any action at all. Doing things, including things that a perso...