Women more likely to suffer from stress-related mental disorders

WOMEN are four times more likely than men to suffer from stress-related mental health disorders and could wait for more than 10 years before getting a diagnosis.

Professor Jim Lucey, consultant psychiatrist and medical director of St Patrick’s University said anxiety disorders are the commonest mental health problems presenting to general practice and that people are “worrying themselves sick and becoming ill with anxiety”.

Prof Lucey said he wanted to make people, especially women, aware of anxiety disorders so they could get help in time.

“Where anxiety features are prominent, it is more likely women’s symptoms will be dismissed rather than diagnosed or treated. The reasons for this are entirely environmental, societal and cultural,” he said.

Anxiety disorders affect four in 100 people and come in two forms — huge peaks of distress which result in panic attacks or general apprehension which leads to a phobic disorder. However, there can be difficulty distinguishing anxiety fromdepression and so getting the right diagnosis is often delayed.

Prof Lucey said people can gradually slip into illness without realising it.

“People can live for years withdrawing from things they used to do and eventually a life that was full is not, and people become guilty and depressed and have a sense of hopelessness.

“People who come for treatment may have had the symptoms or distress for ten years. You can live with it but it becomes problematic when it disables you.”

Prof Lucey stressed that treatment should not be just about medication but had to be a combination of psychological and biological — if needed. “It is principally about getting people to engage with life again. A prescription is not part of a care plan, we need to ask what do we expect to achieve from this? Will it help me to get on a bus? What’s the plan and what will the outcome be?” He said professionals need to embrace the recovery ethos.

“We need to be looking at what works, nobody I know is looking to prescribe medication and call that care.”

He said tackling the mental illness was about raising awareness, access to services and getting people back to living, working and loving.

“You have to bring the services to people, recovery needs to be local, to give people hope and be based on the principles of basic human rights.”

Prof Lucey said the shameful history of psychiatry has to be acknowledged, but it was also time to move on and give people the right to ask the questions about what results they can expect from treatment.

Dr Lucey said everyfamily experiences mental illness of some sort and it had to be recognised as a normal illness which could be easily treated.