I've been looking into the relationship between anxiety and depression. It occurred to me that someone might experience high anxiety and over time that may become intolerable. And if it does, a protection mechanism might kick in so that the person no longer feels their feelings.

That may then result in depression. And this actually has some backing in the scientific literature. There was a study done that looked at 20 ,000 Europeans. They actually gave them telephone interviews to see if they had social phobia.

And what they found was about 1 in 20 people had social phobia. It was more common in women. But what was particularly interesting was that two years after having the social phobia diagnosis, people were 5 .7 times more likely to have a depressive illness than the regular population.

So it seems like the anxiety comes first and then the depression will kick in subsequently afterwards. And they actually state in the conclusion that social phobia is often present in the course of depression and is most obvious when the person is in remission.

So that means that the person develops depression and then if they go into remission from depression, that's when you see the social phobia reappear. So the person is becoming reacquainted then with their feelings and that's when they display the symptoms of the social phobia anxiety.

And then presumably the depression kicks back in and the symptoms of social phobia go away. So it's actually quite interesting how it's possible that people in depression may not feel anxiety, but as soon as they start healing from depression and experiencing their emotions, that's when they might feel anxiety again, even though they might not be aware and have a specific label for it.

That was actually what I experienced. So I find it fascinating and I hope it helps someone else.