Do I Have Anxiety, Depression, or Both?

When something isn’t right with your mental health, you can tell. Symptoms affect your mind and emotions, causing you to be nervous, sad, or hopeless. And mental health conditions like depression and anxiety also cause physical symptoms like sleep irregularities and digestive troubles.

However, figuring out what’s going wrong for your mental health can be more complex. Both depression and anxiety are common mental health conditions among adults in the United States. And these conditions share several types of symptoms. That’s in addition to the fact that depression and anxiety often co-occur!

Board-certified anesthesiologist Dr. Bryant Edwards and the team at Iconic Infusions, PLLC of Fayetteville, North Carolina, understand how complicated diagnosing and addressing your mental health care needs can be. That’s why Dr. Edwards prioritizes a holistic, patient-centered approach to his patients’ care.

Dr. Edwards and his team are here to help you sort out your depression, anxiety, or combined mental health conditions with access to state-of-the-art treatment options.

Symptoms of anxiety and depression

Clinical anxiety and depression arise from heredity, recent life experiences, trauma, and brain differences. Many risk factors that make individuals more prone to depression also apply to anxiety and vice versa.

When you have depression, a low mood lasting from two weeks to multiple years blankets your life experiences. You may notice feelings of shame, despair, or sadness; over- or under-sleeping; under- or over-eating; and withdrawal from daily life experiences and social support.

Anxiety disorders can also result in emotions of shame, sleep disturbances, eating disorders, and social and professional withdrawal from public life. Anxiety may cause your heart to race or trigger panic attacks when you’re exposed to specific stimuli.

Diagnosing your mental health condition

When you work with Dr. Edwards to address your mental health, he helps you understand how your disruptive and difficult symptoms relate back to underlying causal conditions like depression and anxiety.

Discussing your mental health symptoms with a professional is the first step toward identifying your specific disorder or combination of disorders. Once you have your diagnosis, you can partner with the right treatment team to address your mental health care needs.

Improving your mental health

At Iconic Infusions, PLLC, Dr. Edwards specializes in ketamine infusion therapy, which shows promise for addressing anxiety and even treatment-resistant forms of depression. Ketamine causes dissociative effects and, in therapeutic doses, can transform your brain, opening up more balanced mental pathways and helping you get out of anxious or depressive ruts.

Treatments like medication management and talk therapy are also commonly used to address both anxiety and depression. Dr. Edwards can recommend other specialists as needed to assist you in completely rebalancing and improving your mental health.

For help with intrusive, unwanted symptoms of depression or anxiety, contact Dr. Edwards at Iconic Infusions, PLLC, today. Schedule your initial consultation appointment online or over the phone now and get started on the path to freedom from mental health symptoms through better mental health management.