Anxiety or Depression: Which should you treat? The Unmasking and Treatment of Anxiety in Depression

Abstract

A common characteristic of psychiatric patients is to present a great variety of disturbances simultaneously or over time. These disturbances, symptoms, behavior disorders, mutations of his existential condition or of his roles, constitute syndromes and nosological entities on which therapeutic decisions are based. In the rest of medicine the patients show less symptoms but a greater variety of signs are detected in the clinical and complementary examinations. Jores, referring to the field of psychosomatic pathology, stated that the more symptoms a patient presents, the lesser is the probability of his illness being organic, (the exception being when a tumor compresses a nervous plexus).On the other hand, it is possible to catalogue, as Abad has done, the symptoms that can show up in pathologic conditions in general. This catalogue, or semiotic code, consists of around 1,800 symptoms, of which around 200 (11%) belong totally to psychopathology, and roughly the same number occasionally are psychopathologic.