Anxiety Disorder Essay Sample

According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA), anxiety disorders are one of the common mental illnesses affecting 40 million people aged 18 or older. Anxiety is defined as frequently having intense, excessive, and persistent worry about everyday situations. This can cause repeated episodes of sudden feelings of intense anxiety and fear or terror that can last minutes, this is commonly known as panic attacks. People who suffer from anxiety disorders are three to five times more likely to be hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital than those who do not suffer anxiety. Anxiety disorders can be caused by previous life events, personality, and brain chemistry. According to ADAA, anxiety is highly treatable but only 39.9% receive treatment. Depression is defined as a mood disorder that causes persistent feelings of sadness and loss of interest in the things you once enjoyed. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 280 million people in the world have depression. It can cause the person to function poorly at work, school, basically can affect you everyday life, and when it’s at its worst it may lead to suicide. According to WHO, 700,000 people die due to suicide every year. 

In the world there’s a stereotype that states that people who experience depression are just “lazy and weak”, also they think depression and anxiety are supposed to make you cry all the time, have a messy room, get bad grades, but they probably have no idea what it’s like to experience it. I think we all know the symptoms of anxiety and depression. But it is so much more than that. It’s feeling sad and not being able to explain why because you don’t know either. It’s thinking you are faking it because of how others perceive anxiety. It is feeling everything then feeling nothing. It’s feeling alone even though you have friends and people that love you. It is thinking that your feelings are invalid because there are people out there who have it worse than you, so you don’t talk about it. Is sleeping through the day in a dark room, ignoring calls or texts from family and friends, feeling lonely but not wanting company, getting the feeling that when people are laughing because they are laughing at you, is writing what you are going to say before you actually say it.  It is wanting your brain to shut up but it doesn’t happen. It is having high expectations of yourself and overthinking everything. It is getting good grades but still feeling like a failure. It is laughing throughout the day then when night comes you wonder what is wrong with you then crying yourself to sleep.

I chose to write about this because all we hear is people talk about the pandemic and politics, but no one is talking about the 700,000 people that die due to suicide every year. That very 2 hours and 11 minutes a person under the age of 25 dies from suicide, and that suicide is the 3rd leading cause of death of people between the ages 10-24.