Mood Disorders
The mood is the state of mind which colours the perception of the world around you. Any deviation in your mood which is sustained for a long period affects your personal as well as professional life. A person with mood disorder experiences changes like pervasive sadness, changes in energy levels, sleep, appetite, irritable mood, memory deficits, etc... In Mania, you may experience an elevated mood – where you are excessively happy or irritable, with a tendency to be impulsive and make wrong judgments. In contrast, depression is a state of low mood in which you are unfocused and unmotivated. When you have depressive episodes or manic episodes, separated from each other by a period of normalcy, you may be suffering from a bipolar mood disorder.
Anxiety Disorders
Stress is an eventuality which spares no one. Stressors may range from infections, loss of loved ones, change in social or financial standing, and life-altering traumas and pandemics to physical/emotional or sexual abuse. If you have faced or are facing any of these situations, it may be high time that you seek professional help. If left unaddressed, such scenarios along with an underlying genetic susceptibility may push you towards disorders including acute stress reactions, adjustment disorders, PTSD, etc. Anxiety disorders also include long-standing disorders including OCD, generalized anxiety disorders, specific phobias, etc.
Psychotic disorders
Staying rooted in reality is essential for survival of an individual. Sometimes your loved one may report surreal or unreal experiences like seeing images / hearing voices without any fathomable source. They may confide in you about irrational beliefs or suspiciousness to you. Kindly listen to them with an empathetic ear. Your loved one may not realise it but you should be able to understand that this is a cry for help. These symptoms in addition to social withdrawal, muttering to self, sudden changes in sleep and appetite, agitation may be suggestive of psychosis, delusional disorder or schizophrenia. These diseases have the best outcome when diagnosed and treated at the earliest.
Eating and sleeping disorders
Sleep and appetite are biological functions, the alteration of which creates havoc in an individual. When they are affected your mental health professional may think of remedial measures. Occasionally there may not be any other symptoms other than oddities in eating or sleep patterns. For example, in Anorexia nervosa, the person wants to stay thin, is scared of gaining weight, self-induced starvation, and will have physical features of malnutrition. While in Bulimia, the person binges on food and then later purges it which similarly causes malnutrition.
Good undisturbed sleep is what enables most of us to carry on with our hectic schedules. Once disruption occurs in this sleep, it affects our mood and productivity. Sleep disorders include a range of disorders from simple insomnia, to night terrors, sleepwalking (somnambulism), narcolepsy, excessive sleep (hypersomnolence), and so on.
Sexual dysfunction
Sexuality is the essence of a relationship between partners. However, the topic of sexuality is considered taboo in our society, so much so that many a time frustrating yet very easily treatable sexual issues do not come to light and the individual continues to suffer. The decreased sexual desire is commonly seen in perimenopausal women, erectile dysfunction, ejaculation issues, and orgasm disorders are all included in sexual dysfunction. Seeking treatment for such issues is an important step in improving marital relationships and also the person’s own mental and physical health.
Personality disorders
“This is me!” Do the arguments with your friend or loved one end on this adamant note with no room left for discussion? His / her personality traits may most often be the issue. Personality is the total of who you are - your attitudes, belief system, pervasive mood state, and reaction pattern to stressors. There are good aspects to everyone’s personality, as well as undesirable traits. When these start affecting your personal or professional life it may be categorized as a personality disorder. An individual with a paranoid personality disorder is fearful of his surroundings whereas in borderline personality disorder the individual suffers from mood swings, a tendency to harm self, feeling of emptiness, and relationship issues. In obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, a person is preoccupied with rules and regulations so much so that he/she fails to appreciate the joy in small things in life and at times restricts his family’s joy as well.
