Every year, a few weeks before Ramadan, the same question starts coming up in psychiatry clinics across the region. Can I keep taking my medication and still fast?
High-functioning anxiety is not a diagnosis. You will not find it in any psychiatric manual, and no clinician can write it on a form.
The person who books the appointment is often not the person who needs it most. A daughter calls about her father, who has been withdrawn and short-tempered since retiring.
The diagnosis often arrives sideways. A parent takes their own child to be assessed, sits through the description of how ADHD actually presents, and recognises not the child but themselves.
Most couples who walk into therapy are already in trouble. An affair has come out, or one person has a foot out the door, or the arguing has reached a pitch neither of them can stand any more.
The majority of individuals do not view sleep issues as a psychological issue. They say such things as, “I am merely a light sleeper, or I do not switch off at night. Others sleep and wake up feeling tired. Some of them spend hours lying and staring at the ceiling until their bodies cooperate.
Therapy has long been regarded as something one only resorts to when life is getting out of control. Individuals turn to help when they are no longer able to sleep, when they are anxious and unsure about it, and when sadness begins to disrupt normal everyday functioning
It often starts quietly. A headache that won’t go away. A chest that is tight and feels normal at this point. Coming and going digestive problems. Excessively sleepy body. When these things come up, most people do not necessarily think about stress.
We all do it. Something is too heavy, disorienting or too much, and we reach out to make a call to a friend first. Perhaps it is a voice note left at an inconvenient time, a lengthy coffee chat, or a text of Can I rant for five minutes.
Glass towers. Polished lobbies. Quiet confidence. The city moves like it has places to be. It does. And inside that movement live the people who keep it running, flying, trading, approving, forecasting, reconciling, managing risk, managing time, managing reputation, managing everyone else’s expectations.