Anxiety and depression

Is there an epidemic of anxiety at the moment? Barely a week goes by without someone coming to talk to me about one type of anxiety or another: fear of flying to fear of lifts; agoraphobia to acrophobia, social anxiety to workplace stress. It’s often a complicated issue to get to the bottom of, but knowledge is one thing that really seems to help. If you fully understand the body’s adrenaline response and that those waves of anxiety and knots in your stomach, your racing heart and sweaty skin are all down to your body’s over-exuberant release of the stress chemicals – and that this will not hurt you – you have already taken the first important step on the road to recovery.
The other week I went to see Ruby Wax’s show Losing It at the Duchess Theatre in Covent Garden. It’s about her own struggle with clinical depression. Depression is no laughing matter, but her comic approach to the subject helps lift the taboo, while highlighting that one in four of us will suffer from some form of mental health issue at some point in our lives. Ruby is one of those one-in-fours and she is on a mission to help people suffering from depression and bipolar disorder. Like Winston Churchill, she refers to her depression as her black dog and is launching her new website and support groups, BlackDogTribe.com, in November .