Mood disorder or mood swings refer to the mental condition, which includes varieties of depression in humans, along with the bipolar disorder. Mood swings or mood disorders in humans take place due to imbalance in brain chemicals. Stressful life changes and other related life events contribute a lot to depressed mood and such disorders often tend to continue among other family members.
Who Gets Mood Swings?
The following individuals will remain at relatively higher risk to suffer from mood disorders or mood swings.
High Levels of Stress. People experiencing traumatic events remain at relatively higher risk related to developing mood swings. Childhood factors in this case include physical or sexual abuse, death of any one parent or parents, negligence and various other traumatic events, which increase the risk related to mood disorder during the later years of any child’s life. Highly stressed events, like relocating to any new place, losing any job, breakup, witnessing a death in family may trigger depressive or manic episodes. Besides this, a few individuals experience mood swings and even manic episodes because of lack of enough sleep.
Family Member with Similar Type of Disorder. If any of your relative in the nuclear family suffers from mood disorder and usually experiences high and low mood swings, like your sibling, mother or father, you may remain at a relatively higher risk related to suffering from mood disorder. Symptoms related to the problem emerge initially during your teenage years or during the early adulthood with approximate onset at 25years. Even another analysis has revealed that children, whose parents suffering/suffered from severe mental illness has about one-third chance to develop severe form of mental illness during the adulthood.
Alcohol and Drugs Abuse. People who often abuse alcohol or drugs remain at higher risk to develop mood disorder problems. Substance usage does not cause the problem directly but it makes your condition related to mood swings worse and hastens the onset of your symptoms. In some cases, medications may trigger your depressive or manic episode onset. However, as alcohol or drug use activates psychosis, an individual has to undergo with detoxification process from the respective substance or drug before his/her doctor recommends a proper diagnosis to deal with mood disorder problem.
Women At Higher Risk than Men. Mood swings, mood disorders, including bipolar disorders in most of the cases affect in an equal way. However, women remain at about 3 times higher risk to deal with rapid cycling related to mood episodes. Even young girls are more likely to face depressive as well as mixed episodes related to the disorder than men or boys.
Common Symptoms Of Mood Swings And Mood Disorder
Depending on specific type of your mood disorder, age and gender, you may experience different symptoms related to your depression. However, the common symptoms in this category include-
- Empty mood, anxiety and ongoing sadness
- Feeling helpless or hopeless
- Feeling worthless or inadequate
- Experiencing low self-esteem
- Excessively guilty feelings
- Lacking interest in daily activities, which you enjoy at one point of your life
- Repetition of various thoughts related to suicide or death and attempting to commit suicide frequently
- Difficulty in sleeping or sleeping excessively
- Problems in your relationship
- Significant changes in your bodyweight and appetite
- Difficulty in concentration
- Reduction in energy levels
- Reduction in your decision-making ability
- Stomach pain, headache and tiredness, along with other physical complaints arising frequently and never go away without getting proper treatment
- Threats related to running away from your home
- Aggression, hostility and irritability
- Highly sensitive towards rejection or failure.
Conclusion
To conclude, we should risk factors related to mood swings from high to low, mood disorders and its severe form i.e. bipolar disorder depend on different factors, including the hereditary or genetic factors in humans.
Also Read:
