Psychotherapy: diseases — симптомы, диагностика и лечение

Depression is a disease, not a weakness of character or “a bad mood that must be endured.” It is characterized by a persistent decline in mood, loss of the ability to experience pleasure and loss of energy, lasting at least two weeks and interfering with work, study and communication. Depression is highly treatable: a combination of psychotherapy and, if necessary, medication returns a person to normal life in most cases. The main obstacle is stigma: people do not seek help for years, believing that they must cope on their own.

Anxiety disorder is a condition in which worry becomes excessive, persistent, and inappropriate to the actual threat. It ceases to be a useful defensive reaction and begins to control life: a person avoids situations, places and actions, the range of possibilities narrows. The peculiarity of anxiety disorders is that they manifest themselves primarily physically—palpitations, shortness of breath, dizziness—and patients go to cardiologists and neurologists for years, receiving the conclusion “everything is fine.” Meanwhile, this is one of the most well-studied and most treatable conditions in psychiatry.

Irritable bowel syndrome is a functional disorder in which there is abdominal pain and bowel movements, but no structural changes are found on examination. Patients often hear “you’re fine” and are left alone with symptoms that seriously limit their lives. Meanwhile, IBS is a real diagnosis with an understandable mechanism: the interaction between the intestines and the brain is disrupted, the sensitivity of the intestinal wall is increased, and motility is altered. And, importantly, it responds well to treatment - it’s just that this treatment is different from the usual one.

Insomnia is not just “I don’t sleep well,” but a condition in which sleep disturbance occurs at least three nights a week and affects daytime well-being. Its main feature is that over time it breaks away from the original cause and begins to support itself: a person is afraid of not falling asleep, goes to bed with anxiety, and it is this anxiety that prevents sleep. Therefore, sleeping pills, which seem like an obvious solution, work the worst for chronic insomnia - but the first choice is considered to be something completely different.

Autonomic dysfunction is a condition in which a person experiences palpitations, dizziness, shortness of breath, sweating, and heat waves, but testing does not reveal heart, lung, or brain disease. In post-Soviet medicine, this is usually called “VSD” or “vegetative-vascular dystonia”. It is important to understand: this is not an independent disease, but a description of a set of symptoms. There is almost always a specific reason behind them - most often an anxiety disorder or panic attacks, less often endocrine and other diseases. This is why “treatment of VSD” with vascular drips usually does not give results.