In an article in People Magazine, Nicole Pajer helps us understand the differences between anxiety and depression. She also talks about how they overlap and whether they can co-occur.  They can.  Frequently, people will present in my office labeling their mood as anxious. However, when we go through the screening questions and the situations surrounding their mood, they are actually anxious not depressed.

According to Maggie Holland, LMHC:

Maggie Holland, a licensed mental health clinician in Washington, says that anxiety is often thought of as struggling with anticipating the future, and depression is thought of as looking back to the past.

“Unfortunately, it’s a little more complicated than that,” she says. Each of these mental health disorders have their own set of symptoms and many can overlap between the two of them. And though you can absolutely have both at the same time, they are two separately diagnosed conditions.

Thus, adequate diagnosis is key to determine whether you have one or both conditions.  Diagnosis is also key in designing a plan to reduce the severity of the symptoms associated with the condition(s) through therapy and/or medication management.

Here Brandon talks about when anxiety and depression co-occur.

“When you’re anxious, you tend to worry about things and then feel depressed about those things,” says Brandon. “When you’re depressed, you ruminate about the past and begin to feel anxious or worried.”

That is a simplification, but actually closely parallels how some clients describe it.  They have complained of feeling depressed because of their anxiety, feeling broken, and despairing of managing the anxiety so that they can ‘be like everybody else”. Some feel like a “freak” or “crazy” because of how they react with panic and anxiety.  Depressed clients will have and endless loop of all their “supposed failures”, “how they don’t measure up” and become anxious at new changes or having to change aspects of their lives to improve their situation.  They worry about potential promotions, about having periods of happiness because they believe inevitably they will have something else bad happen, and similar types of worry about when things will go bad or get worse.

Lastly, it is also very important to educate consumers about their moods and how therapy works.  The more educated the consumer, the better they are able to track and manage their own symptoms.  It also means they are more likely to be compliant with treatment and invested in the process.