Anxious depression has recently been drawing increased interest from patients, practitioners, and mental health researchers. A form of depression, anxious depression combines symptoms from both mental health conditions, constituting a growing concern for those faced with the double-sided issue. As a result, treatments such as transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS therapy for anxiety in depression are being studied for their mental health benefits regarding this condition.
Read on to find out how TMS can alleviate the symptoms of anxious depression.
Major depressive disorder, commonly referred to as depression, is a common mood disorder that causes the individual experiencing it a deep and persistent sadness, the inability to experience joy, or both. Additional, possible symptoms include hopelessness, irritability, emptiness, trouble concentrating, sleep disturbance, significant weight change when not dieting, low self-esteem, self-harm, and suicidality.
Patients experiencing depression often describe it as a sinking sense of loss: they talk about shutting down, no longer participating in everyday life, feeling as though their energy is draining from them, and losing all hope that things will improve.
Patients with anxiety, on the other hand, describe an overabundance of aversive emotion, as if a scalding caldron has bubbled over inside them: they talk about being overly alert, and looking out for triggers signaling danger, unpleasantness, or a possible source of intense frustration, even when in a relatively calm setting.
Another serious mental health condition, anxiety is in fact the most common family of mental health disorders. At its core, anxiety is seen as a state of unpleasant hyperarousal that mimics the survival mechanism of fear, despite not being faced with an actual, threatening situation. This overworking of the individual’s physical and mental states can cause exhaustion, frustration and eventually even depression, as they routinely find themselves extremely scared or concerned.
With such differing descriptions of their possible sources and manifestations, it is somewhat surprising that anxiety and depression share extremely high comorbidity rates. So high, in fact, that studies have estimated that as much as 60% of those diagnosed with either disorder also contend with the other.
How, then, are such findings explained, when depression is viewed as a process of shutting down, while anxiety is seen as an overflow of emotions?
The answer to this can be varied, and changes from patient to patient. First, and mentioned earlier, anxiety and depression can lead to one another: facing the destabilizing hyperarousal of anxiety without finding relief can bring about a feeling of hopelessness, which can turn into depression. Conversely, dealing with the self-hate and self-criticism that can characterize depression, could lead individuals to avoid social situations that force them to explain how they are feeling to those around them, which in turn could develop into social anxiety.
Second, symptoms of anxiety and depression could arise in the same individual in response to different triggers or within different settings.
Third, genetics appear to be a deciding factor in their shared appearances, as both anxiety and depression are apparently linked to neuroticism, which has been shown to be a very hereditary character trait. Neuroticism is defined as the tendency to react negatively to triggering external stressors, and is known to induce feelings of sadness, guilt and anger, all of which are linked to both anxiety and depression.
Finally, certain shared neural structures have been connected to anxiety and depression; specifically, damage to the amygdala, which aids in emotional processing, has been shown to cause symptoms of these two disorders.
Certain symptoms of depression are also considered symptoms of anxiety. Restlessness, for example, can appear as part of a major depressive diagnosis, with the individual experiencing it unable to relax and enjoy their life. It can also be symptomatic of an anxiety disorder, such as general anxiety, causing an individual to be prone to excessive worrying. In addition to restlessness, becoming easily exhausted, disrupted sleep patterns, high irritability and a general difficulty concentrating can all be ascribed to depression, anxiety, or both.
According to the American Psychiatric Association (APA), individual cases must exhibit the necessary duration, severity, and number of symptoms to amount to an official mental health diagnosis. As such, a patient diagnosed with both anxiety and depression would be referred to as having a mixed diagnosis.
Anxious depression is somewhat different in that it is, first and foremost a subset of depression. As a fairly new definition, current research defines anxious depression as cases that meet the criteria for an official major depression diagnosis, while also exhibiting a subthreshold level of anxiety. In other words, while a patient with anxious depression mainly suffers from depression, they still contend with certain symptoms of anxiety.
Anxious depression is presently being studied in an attempt to decipher what treatments can best mitigate its symptoms. Among the treatments being studied is Deep Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, or Deep TMS: a noninvasive medical device treatment, Deep TMS uses patented neurostimulation technology to safely and effectively regulate the activity of neural networks implicated in the appearance of depression. Over time, this treatment has been proven to offer significant symptom relief, without causing any severe or long-lasting side effects. TMS can also be combined with other forms of therapy, such as antidepressants, to enhance the overall treatment regimens efficacy.
The FDA has already recognized the ability of treatments such as TMS therapy for anxiety in depression, to safely and effectively bring about anxious depression symptom relief.
The benefits of TMS on anxiety symptoms in depression have also been garnering attention. A 2019 study published in Depression and Anxiety, for instance, found that patients who had undergone TMS showed a reduction of anxiety and depression symptoms, with TMS found to be an effective treatment to combat these conditions.
In addition to an overall reduction in depressive and anxiety symptoms, a positive correlation between the two symptom types was also found: as such, a reduction in depression symptom severity was correlated with a similar reduction in anxiety symptoms severity.
As more that is discovered about anxious depression, the greater the insight that patients with this condition are provided. And as our understanding of what affects anxious depression grows, the better we all are at addressing and treating it.
