ADHD can be hard to manage, especially if you’re new to the diagnosis. For some people, labels are comforting and they provide information to better understand ADHD brains. For others, you’re left with more questions like “Can ADHD cause anxiety and depression?”
Maybe you still feel like ADHD doesn’t explain all of the symptoms you manage in your day-to-day life. This is more common than you think and there are a few links between ADHD, anxiety, and depression that may help better understand your mental health.
This post is all about whether can ADHD cause anxiety and depression or not.
What is ADHD?
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is characterized by patterns of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. This means that people with ADHD struggle to stay focused on a task, often fidget and move constantly, and act without thinking or control.
These symptoms interfere with executive functioning, which helps you to coordinate your activities and behaviors. Approximately 10% of children are diagnosed with ADHD, as of 2019, and about 4% for the adult population.
However, studies suggest that only 20% of people with ADHD are diagnosed, which means 80% of people with ADHD are not getting treatment for it.
What is Anxiety?
Anxiety is characterized by excessive worry and intrusive thoughts that cause physical symptoms like increased blood pressure.
This becomes Generalized Anxiety Disorder when excessive worry and intrusive thoughts happen frequently for a long time and they feel uncontrollable and unrealistic. You may worry about everyday things that other people would find unreasonable or irrational.
Other types of anxiety disorders include Panic Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. Anxiety disorders affect about 20% of adults in the general population, making them the most common mental illness.
What is Depression?
Depression is characterized by persistent sadness, emptiness, and hopelessness as well as decreased energy and interest in activities. You can also suffer from changes to your sleep patterns, physical aches, and suicidal thoughts.
If you ever deal with suicidal thoughts, please reach out to a mental health professional or the Suicide Hotline. About 10% of adults are diagnosed with depressive disorders.
Women are 50% more likely to experience depression. Adults aged 18-25 and people who identify as biracial have the highest prevalence of depression compared to other age and racial demographics.
CAN ADHD CAUSE ANXIETY AND DEPRESSION:
1. You struggle with emotional regulation
Emotional regulation depends on self-awareness. To regulate your emotions, you need to first notice your emotions and consider their source. For example, if you get angry and suffer from emotional dysregulation, you will take that anger out on anyone who interacts with you.
Maybe you will displace it upon certain people, but you won’t connect the source of your anger to the people who are impacted by your angry outburst. In other words, an angry person who lacks self-awareness will hurt people simply because they are hurt and angry.
However, someone who can regulate their emotions will notice that they are angry and take a break from the situation to de-escalate their emotions. This typically happens in two ways.
You either get angry with someone and escalate the conversation into an argument that will not be productive. Or you interact with someone, get angry, and end that interaction. But, you are still angry because of that interaction, which may affect how you interact with other people.
In both of these scenarios, it’s important to recognize that you don’t want to hurt others because of the emotions you are experiencing. Maybe you yell at someone at work because of an email you got or continue yelling hurtful things at your partner during an argument.
In this case, you would hurt someone else because you aren’t processing your emotions. People with ADHD, anxiety, or depression may struggle to self-regulate. With ADHD, you are masking your ADHD symptoms, so you’re focusing on a different level of self-awareness.
If you experience anxiety, your thoughts are constantly stressing you, which is easy to then take out on other people. Lastly, depression will require lots of energy from you, which means you have less energy to regulate your emotions when you’re angry, sad, or frustrated.
2. Your go-to coping mechanism is social isolation
Anxious and depressed people will often isolate themselves. Anxious people will avoid situations that will increase their anxiety symptoms of excessive worry and intrusive thoughts.
Instead of dealing with their brain telling them they don’t know how to interact with other people and that everyone hates them, they will avoid people being around people. Depressed people will often avoid social situations.
Clinical depression makes people uncomfortable. If you are not presenting yourself as outgoing and energetic, then people will naturally want to know why or criticize you. In the United States, people expect you to be kind and happy regardless of how you’re feeling.
For people who already struggle with energy and interest, it’s an easy choice to avoid situations that would increase those feelings. Plus, depression already comes with a lack of interest in being around people and spending energy on presenting a certain persona.
ADHD pairs well with anxiety and depression because people with ADHD have to mask their symptoms to avoid criticism. Their symptoms of anxiety will often intensify these feelings by convincing them that people dislike them due to their ADHD diagnosis and symptoms.
3. You experience a loss of interest in enjoyable activities
Since a loss of interest is one of the main symptoms of depression, it makes sense that ADHD and General Anxiety Disorder are both linked to Major Depressive Disorder.
If someone has one of these disorders, they are more likely to have the others because they often feed off each other and reinforce each other. Depression, as mentioned earlier, causes people to lose interest in activities they once enjoyed.
Anxiety can reinforce this by making it even harder to initiate those activities. For instance, you used to love exercising. You would get up and run in the morning, which made you feel fit and benefited your mental health. Now, you’re experiencing a depressive episode.
The moment you have enough interest to start running, your anxiety will try to talk you out of it. Thoughts like “Is it too late to run?” or “I’m not a runner anymore, so why bother?” might pop up.
So, your major depression and anxiety can work together to decrease your interest in enjoyable activities. ADHD can interact with these symptoms in two ways.
First, you will have an even harder time initiating these activities, due to executive dysfunction, and your inattention will make it hard to stay invested in the activity for the duration of it.
4. You’ve dealt with untreated ADHD for a while
The majority of people with ADHD don’t know they have it. There are multiple reasons for this, including gender and racial disparities in the medical system. One of the main reasons is that society forces people to conform to social standards.
Society does not ask questions like “Why is this student struggling in school?” These types of questions can reveal that a student is struggling because they can’t focus which leads to an ADHD diagnosis.
Instead, these students are labeled as unintelligent and “behind,” rather than given the resources to succeed. So, you’ve been told repeatedly throughout your life that your struggle is all because you aren’t smart or capable.
Therefore, it makes sense that you’d start hiding those parts of yourself. You will work that much harder to hide your ADHD symptoms, which can lead to anxiety or depression. If your ADHD hasn’t been treated or you deal with undiagnosed ADHD, two problems arise.
You don’t have the coping mechanisms to manage your ADHD and you’ve dealt with the stigma around symptoms of ADHD. Therefore, you might develop anxiety and depression as a result of hiding your ADHD as well as trying to cope with it.
5. You’re at a higher risk for comorbid conditions
ADHD, anxiety, and depression are comorbid conditions. This means that being diagnosed with one of these mental disorders is one of the major risk factors for experiencing the others.
This comorbidity means that, when are diagnosed with two or more mental illnesses, they will interact and change your prognosis. The typical treatment you get for managing ADHD may not take into consideration your comorbid anxiety disorder or comorbid depression.
It’s important to recognize that you are at increased risk for these disorders while also recognizing why it’s so important to screen for them. If you have ADHD and you are receiving treatment for it, it’s worth asking your therapist about anxiety and depression.
Be open with them about the symptoms you’re experiencing so they can give the coping mechanisms that will work best for your mental health condition.
When you work with a healthcare provider, it’s possible that your treatment plans aren’t working because of these other factors. Your anxious thoughts and depressive symptoms may affect how well you can benefit from treatment that doesn’t consider them.
Mental health professionals can help you manage your mood disorders by learning about your specific symptoms. This gives them a full picture to provide you with an accurate diagnosis and treatment.
6. You experience low self-esteem
ADHD, anxiety, and depression will change the way you interact with the world. Maybe you’ve struggled to keep up with school, work, and friends your entire life. Whether you just got a diagnosis of ADHD or you’ve known your entire life, you are still neurodivergent.
Your brain works differently. Anxiety is no different in that your brain works differently because it’s constantly worrying about everything that can go wrong and how to avoid it. This type of worry has to affect the way you live and people notice.
They notice when you struggle to make a simple decision or watch everyone around you carefully to make sure that no one is annoyed. Lastly, depression often, on its own, makes people believe they’re worthless.
One of the major signs of depression is that depressed people believe their lives are hopeless and they are worthless.
So, once you look at each of these mental health disorders together, it’s clear that low self-esteem can indicate that you suffer from more than one of these mental health issues.
When considering if you are struggling with feelings of anxiety and depressive symptoms, make sure that you refer to diagnostic criteria, online screenings, and professional help from therapists.
Since these psychiatric disorders have similar symptoms, it’s easy to get confused. Take the first step towards a proper diagnosis without making assumptions that could make it difficult to learn more about your unique ADHD experience.
