Bipolar Vs. Anxiety: The Unlikely Relatives
Imagine being on a euphoric mental high so powerful, it makes you dangerous to yourself and others. It makes quickly spending your life savings and engaging in risky sexual behaviors seem like a natural course of action for the intense euphoria you’re experiencing. After this “high,” your mental state quickly takes a downturn. You crash, you hit the proverbial wall. It becomes hard to function, even though everything was so effortless just days before. As one patient, comparing her mental state during highs and lows to a sprinting race, puts it, “Life, everyone and everything in life, me included, are exquisitely and fabulously beautiful. But then the sprint and marathon race inside my brain finishes. My brain becomes completely exhausted — depleted of everything it had.” By definition, you are experiencing the manic and depressive episodes shared by all sufferers of this disorder, commonly known as bipolar.
Now, imagine you are fearfully anticipating an upcoming event. Your anticipation is so pervasive it makes it hard to think about anything else or to focus on things that need to be accomplished for school or for work. In fact, it’s even affecting you physically, in the form of muscle tension and lightheadedness. “It feels like a constant heaviness in your mind; like something isn’t quite right, although oftentimes you don’t know exactly what that something is.” You would be experiencing generalized anxiety.
Now put the two together, the manic highs and depressive lows, the heavy thoughts and the fearful anticipation. This combination of bipolar and anxiety disorders, something psychologists refer to as comorbidity, is in fact what many bipolar patients experience regularly. According to a study performed on bipolar patients who were part of the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions, an estimated 60% of people diagnosed with bipolar have also suffered from an accompanying anxiety disorder. This is in contrast to the 2.9% of the population of American adults that suffer from anxiety disorders who may or may not have an accompanying mental illness. Although anxiety may be hard to distinguish from the highly aroused mental state that comes with bipolar manic highs, Dr. Naiomi M. Simon, Associate Director of the Center for Anxiety and Traumatic Stress Disorders at Massachusetts General Hospital and Assistant Professor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, says that several key factors can help in making a diagnosis. The presence of anxious mood, general worry, panic attacks, or related anxiety symptoms, extended periods of sleeplessness when not in a manic state, and even the time frame during which anxiety symptoms develop, all aid in making a proper diagnosis for an accompanying anxiety disorder.
The fact that these two diseases are so closely tied together is problematic for several reasons. First, some studies show that individuals diagnosed with both disorders were twice as likely to be hospitalized during a depressive episode than those strictly diagnosed with bipolar. The study also correlated stronger bipolar symptoms, such as more manic and depressive episodes and a higher likelihood of suicidal behavior, with a co-occurrence of an anxiety-related diagnosis. Second, just as bipolar is tied to a higher likelihood of experiencing anxiety, the reverse is true as well; those experiencing symptoms solely related to an anxiety diagnosis are nine times more likely to develop bipolar disorder at some point in their lifetime. Third, treatment for comorbid anxiety and bipolar may be more difficult, as some of the medications prescribed for anxiety may trigger manic episodes even when the patient is taking medicine to control the effects of their bipolar. In addition, antidepressants are sometimes addictive, which may be especially problematic for those more prone to substance abuse as a result of their bipolar.
Despite the potential complications in treatment, there is still hope for decreased symptoms for those struggling with both bipolar and anxiety. According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, therapy, in addition to taking prescribed medication, may play a crucial role in mitigating patients’ anxiety symptoms. Research is still being done to investigate the effectiveness of these techniques as they relate to anxiety and bipolar comorbidity.
Though bipolar and anxiety treatment together is still proving to be a challenge for healthcare providers, the combination of both disorders is certainly not uncommon or unique by any means. The comorbidity of these two disorders affects over half of the those diagnosed with bipolar, an important and startling statistic. According to this statistic, patients of both illnesses would actually be in the majority. Dealing with this sort of mental illness is a complex battle, but with continued research and developments in this field of psychology, perhaps bipolar may one day feel a little less like an exhaustive marathon race and anxiety may feel a little less all-consuming. In the meantime, perhaps increased awareness for the complications of both these disorders can give those of us who do not have to suffer under the grip of manic and depressive episodes and generalized anxiety a better understanding of what sufferers of these disorders experience regularly, perhaps every day.
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