Anxiety Disorders

Anxiety disorders are one of the most common mental illnesses. Like other illnesses, the causes, severity, and treatments for anxiety can vary from person to person. Anxiety disorders—including panic disorders, obsessive compulsive disorder, and phobias—cause prolonged feelings of fear and panic in people burdened by them. Now, of course everyone has felt feelings of anxiety in their lifetimes, whether it's over impending deadlines, life changes, or anything else, really. However, it only becomes a diagnosable disorder when you get these feeling so often, and so severely, that it affects your day-to-day life. Common symptoms of any of these disorder include: panic attacks, chest pains, and nightmares. Anxiety disorders are most frequently treated with talk therapy and medications.

Mood Disorders

Mood disorders, such as depression and bipolar disorder, are also very common. Depression is the most common of these; over 300 million people worldwide are currently suffering from depression. Depression entails extended periods of despair and sadness, often causing serious lack of motivation, fatigue, withdrawals from normal interactions and daily activities, self harm, and suicidal thoughts. The severity of the depression can heavily vary from person to person. In fact, there are three different categories: mild, moderate, and severe. Mild depression, naturally, is the least severe, still allowing people to be able to go on with their daily lives. Severe depression can cause the person diagnosed with to barely even take of themselves, let alone leave their house and participate in normal activites. Treatments for depression and other mood disorders include talk therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, and medications.

Personality Disorders

The term 'personality disorders,' unlike anxiety or depression, is an umbrella term for many different types of illnesses. There also much different than the other disorders mentioned here in that they don't actually cause any unease in the people that have them. However, the symptoms of personality disorders are incredibly noticeable to people interacting with individual that have them. Since people don't realize that their thoughts and personality are heavily skewed, they don't tend to realize they are afflicted with one, and oftentimes never recieve any treatment for their disorder. While there are many different types of personality disorders, the most common two are borderline personality disorder (BPD), and narcissitic personality disorder (NPD). BPD cause severe fluxuations in mood and instability in their emotions. NPD causes over-inflated sense of self and feeling of entitlement in people that have it. Personality disorders can be treated with talk therapy and medications.

Eating Disorders

Eating disorders cause those afflicted to have issues with their perception of food, how much they eat, and oftentimes their body image. There are three main types of eating disorders: bulimia nervosa, anorexia nervosa, and binge-eating. Bulimia is when some regularly binge eats, then purges all the food they just ate. Anorexia is when someone does not eat enough food to properly sustain themselves. Binge-eating, meanwhile, is when people just eat way too much. There are many different steps to treating an eating disorder, especially depending of severity. One would usually start with treating the physical complications that have come with the disorder. Once they are healthy and have started eating regularly again, then they can move on to mental treatments, including therapy, medications, and health education.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) occurs when a person experiences horribly traumatizing events. They will have near-constant flashbacks to event/s, as well as having serious night terrors and many other symptoms. It can also cause symptoms of anxiety and depression to develop, as well as anger issues, or other mood issues. PTSD is most common in war veterans and victims of serious abuse, but can also be cause by any other violent or traumatizing event that someone has experienced. Treatment can include various types of therapy and medications.

Psychotic Disorders

Psychotic disorders—like personality disorder, is an umbrella term for a number of illnesses—cause those afflicted to become severely out of touch with reality. This can come in many different forms, such as paranoia, hallucination, and others. The most common and well-known psychotic disorder is schizophrenia. There are many different types of schizophrenia, but all of them cause some sort of delusions, whether it be paranoia, hallucinations, or strange and impossible beliefs. Those affected can be treated with therapy, medication, and sometimes even hospitalization, if symptoms are severe enough.