Anxiety & Eating Disorders: When the alarm bells won't stop ringing Playing With Marbles

Anxiety is extremely common. A third of us will experience an anxiety disorder. It’s the most common mental health problem in young people, and it can make you feel like you’re going to die.. You know someone who has an anxiety disorder. Maybe it’s you.

It can be a normal reaction to stress or danger, but when anxiety becomes irrational, when the release of stress hormones is not in proportion with external realities, then it’s a disorder, and anxiety disorders have the power to paralyze a person between fight or flight. It can mean breaking down in tears because you want toast when your partner has finished the bread. It can be intensely physical, like a painful weight on your chest.

For Jess, a big part of her anxiety story was an eating disorder. This isn’t unusual, anxiety disorders also tend to occur alongside other mental illnesses. 25% of people with ADHD will also have an anxiety disorder, almost half of people with major depressive disorder have an anxiety disorder as well, and over half of people with OCD have an anxiety disorder.

So this episode of Playing with Marbles is going to focus first on Jess’s anxiety, and then on her eating disorder.

If this sounds like picking from a catalogue of disorders, found in different categories in a big book of mental illness… that’s because it is. If you’ve ever talked to a doctor about your mental health you’ll probably have had the experience of filling out a questionnaire. That’s the doctor looking to see if you match the criteria for a diagnosis set out in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (or the DSM-5. It can feel a little impersonal… but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We’re talking to a scientist who can tell us why this method gets used, but also how they’re looking to move past a categorical approach to something a little more personal.