User:Maria.arriaga22/Stress-related disorders

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Anxiety, PTSD, Depression and Trauma are among different stress-related disorders that millions of people deal with each day. With OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) though, different institutes like the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences sees it as an stress-related disorder. With WHO (World Health Organization), unfortunately they exclude OCD as being considered a disorder. Research has focused on two primary contributing factors to this psychopathology, genetic vulnerability and environmental stressors.

Depression is where you feel low and it affects the way you think, behave, and act. This does affect more than 280 million people. Those who deal with this disorder can also experience the loss of motivation or interest in normal activities, hopelessness and sadly suicidal thoughts. There are many life events that can cause depression like neglect, abuse, childbirth (postpartum), unemployment, loosing a loved one, financial difficulties, bullying, etc.

PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) is a mental and behavior disorder that occurs from experiencing different traumatic events like assault, war, domestic violence, abuse, etc. Different symptoms from this can include painful thoughts or dreams that are related from the event, trauma related cues that involve distress, using more of the fight-or-flight response, being at risk for suicide and self-harm, etc.

With Anxiety, even though it can relate to fear, it's more of having the emotion of worry. Some symptoms of it include muscle tension, fatigue, being unable to breathe, restlessness, problems in concentrating, etc. There are different types of anxiety like existential, social, test, separation, stage fright, etc. Panic Attacks are also a very common thing to have when dealing with anxiety.

Image shows what the brain with PTSD and stress looks like.

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Research is being done to focus on two different factors into finding the source of psychopathology. These two are known to be genes and stress. For many years, the model that has been used for a long time with psychiatric disorders is called the 'diathesis-stress' hypothesis. The diathesis-stress hypothesis states that genes predisposing an individual to stress-related disorders combined with experiencing adversity (both used independently and in groups) increase the chance for developing the disorder. The threshold being crossed would be the result of this matter. Bipolar Disorder and Schizophrenia include a risk factor leaning towards stress as being the main factor for these two disorders. Family and twin studies have also been used to test the relationship between genetic factors and different stress-related disorders which does include PTSD, Anxiety and Depression. This is basically demonstrating how these disorders are inherited through the generations.

In 2024, Pixar released another sequel to the original movie called Inside Out 2. This movie follows the life of 13-year-old Riley especially with her now being a teenager. She has different emotions like Joy, Sadness, Anger, and Fear. Inside Out 2 though does introduce new emotions including Anxiety, Embarrassment, Envy, and Ennui (Boredom). According to Lisa Damour who is a clinical psychologist and author of The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, she has many comments about the film and mentions that because we consider anxiety to be pathological, we need to embrace anxiety as part of the team as long as it's kept in bounds (Mullally, 2024).

Image shows what remote learning classes looked liked for students during COVID-19 pandemic.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the effects from it in terms of social distancing, events being cancelled, classes moving online, etc. caused a lot of stress and fear for everyone. Looking at the view for teachers, classes moving online caused a lot of stress for them especially with figuring out how to set their lesson plans so that they can continue to teach their students and not let them fall behind. An article from Medicine describes how even though online classes are common in the university level, it may have also had an impact with the mental health on teachers because of the change in such a short period of time, having no adequate training for the use of digital resources, and in most cases no provision of adequate equipment for remote classes (Silva,D et al.,2021).

Strategies

There are different strategies and coping skills that can help those with anxiety problems. One strategy that's helpful for stress and anxiety reduction is using the five R's which is Recognition, Relationships, Removal, Relaxation, and Re-engagement. With Recognition, you want to see what is creating or causing the situation with your anxiety or stress. With Relationships, you want to know the important people in your life who you can trust and seek support with this. With Removal, with seeing what's causing the anxious feeling, you want to figure out a way to be able to control the stressor and not let it take control. For Relaxation, it's helpful to know what exercises and breathing skills you can use to be able to control the anxiety feeling. Finally with Re-engagement, being able to understand how to control the feeling from re-exposure with stress and anxiety is important. Dealing with an Stress-Related Disorder is hard because not only does it bring challenges in life, reaching out for assistance and help is hard especially for the individual. It's important to know that there are ways to control these emotions and know that you're not alone.

References

Depression (mood)

Post-traumatic stress disorder