\nMost disorders both mental and physical are managed and not cured. In medicine we think of cure as a total reversal of an illness to the point where there's no evidence of it and it does not return. the closest we get to this scenario is...\nMost disorders both mental and physical are managed and not cured. In medicine we think of cure as a total reversal of an illness to the point where there's no evidence of it and it does not return. the closest we get to this scenario is fixing a broken limb. Or treating a vitamin deficiency by giving a vitamin supplement.
In this video, I discuss the main mental illnesses that tend to come and go over the course of your life over time and talk about how they tend to look over time. These main illnesses are major depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorders, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and schizophrenia.
The mood disorders like major depression and bipolar disorder, are recurring illnesses where you have episodes that last a while and then resolve. Some people who can have chronic symptoms, but the classic picture is that you have discrete episodes that resolve and return. You have periods in between with either very few of symptoms or no symptoms. When your symptoms go away we call it a remission. When your symptoms return we call it a relapse. So both depression and bipolar disorder are relapsing and remitting illnesses.
Anxiety disorders tend to behave a little bit differently. Rather than being episodic, they tend to come and go in intensity over time. Kind of like a wave that crests and then recedes. So there can be periods of your life where your anxiety can feel unmanageable and you may seek treatment for it. And then there can be periods of time where it's not that bad. The usual is that you don't become completely free of anxiety. It's just that your symptoms are manageable.
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder tends to act a little differently from anxiety over the course of your life. Generally, symptoms can improve or nearly resolve once you become an adult. But not resolve to the point of being completely absent. Residual ADHD symptoms can look like being a slow reader, or being disorganized and losing things a lot or not being a good listener. There can be little things here and there that don't cause much dysfunction for you. But if you become stressed because you're going through a difficult period in your life, your ADHD symptoms may be more prominent.
Schizophrenia tends to more look more like a series of plateaus. A person can start out with somewhat mild symptoms that don't always look like schizophrenia. And then at some point the symptoms fully manifest. I did a video explaining schizophrenia. I’ll put a link in the description and in the corner of this video so you want to watch that video after this one. But the usual course with schizophrenia is that once the symptoms fully manifest, a person can remain at that level of illness severity for a while and it can be years. And then at some point there is a decline and the symptoms increase. You may get more medication added, but that seems to be your new baseline and this is more the case the cognitive symptoms. So Instead of having a gradual deterioration which some people can have, there's this stepwise downward trend. The good news about this pattern is that the interval between the steps can be very long like years. So someone who develops the disorder at 25 and lives until 75 may only have three or 4 steps downward.\n
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