You know there's so much talk on many physical symptoms being "psychogenic" or whatever. Even psychologists or general medical professionals will claim that whatever symptoms you are feeling are probably psychogenic.
It makes me wonder if many things might be the other way around. That there's clear physical reasons for many mental or psychological problems.
It's just always easier to claim something is psychogenic when you don't know the cause with hopes that it's enough to placebo the patient to calm down about anything they might be feeling.
When someone, especially a professional claims that whatever you are feeling is psychogenic it feels like a dismissal of what you are feeling. A person is feeling something wrong and essentially they are being told that you are imagining it, and it actually does not matter. Which in a way makes it worse, because not only you are feeling it, you are also being told you are crazy to feel it.
And that there's no hope or solution for it, because you are imagining it, therefore it can't be solved, or you don't know how to solve it in the first place.
I have a history of mental problems and I mostly attribute it to physical problems. At some point I realized that chronic pain prevented me from sleeping well and when I don't sleep well, I feel like crap. When this goes on for a long time, I don't even notice the link anymore since being in pain and sleeping bad just becomes the normal state of things.
I've been able to manage my pains by a combination of lots of aerobic exercising and yoga/stretching type workouts. I'm not in perfect condition yet, but things are certainly better.
I wonder if all or most of depression/anxiety on people is just some physical problem/pain preventing them from sleeping well and bad sleep causing them to feel like shit.
I went through something similar. A physical problem was disturbing my sleep, but not in a "I haven't slept all night" way. After a few weeks I was so fatigued and brain-fogged that I was very worried for my mental health and ability to do my job. It took a lot of time to piece together what was happening and start taking measures to get my sleep back in decent shape. This was the right call: I still have the underlying physical issue but now I can both 1) be a functional human 2) address the physical issue with a functioning brain, which would have been impossible when I was impaired by lack of sleep.
I wouldn't go as far as to say "most" depression/anxiety is caused by lack of sleep, but by now I am certain that a huge amount of undiagnosed or untreated health issues are caused by stuff like inflammation states, lack of sleep, digestion not doing its thing, muscles doing something wrong, and often more than one of these.
That it's psychogenic doesn't mean they're imagining it, or even that it's not physical. The brain is a physical organ that is responsible for regulating bodily processes after all. Mental processes have direct and obvious physical effects on other organs, so of course they can also have subtler dysregulatory effects as well.
Sometimes the cause or treatment might be physical, sometimes it might be mental, because the mental intervention might be just as effective, even with our current poor understanding of the brain.
It doesn’t mean that they are imagining it. Why is it hard to see that the organ that controls the whole body has a say into pain/inflammation, and all that? It can send my heart rate to the sky before a presentation, make my stomach ready for digestion on the sight of a billboard, etc.
I don’t know, the reverse that mental diseases don’t cause physical symptoms seems harder to believe.
It all just shows that we don’t take mental health seriously enough.
You are mistaking Stress perhaps with depression. It is 99% more likely that a physical problem is the root problem and that is causing the depression. Thats what depression is. Something is wrong with your body and your brain is sad about it. You dont just get depressed for no reason and then your body breaks for no reason from that depression.
It makes me wonder if many things might be the other way around. That there's clear physical reasons for many mental or psychological problems.
It's just always easier to claim something is psychogenic when you don't know the cause with hopes that it's enough to placebo the patient to calm down about anything they might be feeling.
When someone, especially a professional claims that whatever you are feeling is psychogenic it feels like a dismissal of what you are feeling. A person is feeling something wrong and essentially they are being told that you are imagining it, and it actually does not matter. Which in a way makes it worse, because not only you are feeling it, you are also being told you are crazy to feel it.
And that there's no hope or solution for it, because you are imagining it, therefore it can't be solved, or you don't know how to solve it in the first place.