Anxiety is an exaggeration of the normal mental and physical sensations of fear. Anxiety can manifest as fears, nervousness, restlessness, worries, uncertainty, irritability, and trouble concentrating. In children, anxiety can be confused with ADHD, because of restlessness and trouble focusing.

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Sometimes adults experience depression, anxiety, OCD, or mood problems which don’t seem to respond to standard treatments. When this occurs, patients don’t need more guess work. They need someone who can bring together advanced knowledge of medications and of how brain cells function.

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Autism is considered a spectrum disorder because the number and intensity of the symptoms people with autism display can vary widely. All individuals afflicted with autism demonstrate some degree of challenge in the following three areas: communication, social relationships and restricted patterns of behavior.

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ADHD is a brain disorder involving attention, impulsivity, and distractibility. Children with ADHD often have difficulty with impulse control, so they can have problems with anger management, frustration control, social interactions, and making safe choices. However, hyperactivity or poor attention do not equal ADHD – other problems can present with the same symptoms.

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Bipolar Disorder is a serious, lifelong illness, typified by extreme changes in mood, energy, & behavior. Often children will have a mix of euphoria and irritability, looking silly one moment and rageful the next. Without treatment, Bipolar Disorder tends to worsen with time. Episodes of mood dysregulation become more severe, more frequent, and occur without precipitant.

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About 5% of children & teens experience depression. Warning signs are loss of interest in enjoyable activities, isolation, frequent sadness or tearfulness, low self-esteem, talking about suicide, poor concentration, and/or frequent complaints of headaches or stomach aches. Children under stress may become depressed, but often there is a biological predisposition or vulnerability. Depression tends to run in families.

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Down Syndrome or Trisomy 21 results from a triplication (3 copies) of all or part of chromosome 21; however, it remains unclear which of the approximately 250 genes causes the core features of the disorder. A number of medical challenges can be caused by the extra genes, but there is considerable variability. Physicians treating children and adults with Down Syndrome must be mindful of this wide range of significant medical issues.

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Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is a particularly severe form of anxiety, characterized by intrusive thoughts and repeated actions. Most patients with OCD develop symptoms in childhood or adolescence. The classic example of repeated handwashing is but one manifestation of a complex interplay of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that patients with OCD experience.

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Teens struggle with many issues. Increased school demands, social and drug pressures, friend and family issues, and bullying can all feel overwhelming. Sometimes one or more issues can be so severe that it unexpectedly creates a real difficulty for a previously well-functioning teen. For other teens, these pressures can make a previously mild anxiety much more severe.

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Some children have weaknesses in the neurological systems that process sensations. Sensations, like touch or sound, may be overwhelming. Children with SID may have extreme aversive and emotional reactions to certain sensations. SID can have profound effects on a child’s ability to be successful at home, in school, and in the world.

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It is unlikely that DSM diagnoses are distinct entities, but instead represent several different biological pathways. Individual symptoms, like impulsivity, result from abnormal neurophysiological processes spanning multiple diagnoses (ADHD, mania, frontal lobe injury). Recent studies indicate neuroimaging can be helpful to uncover these processes & guide treatment.

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Over time, the explanation of psychiatric illnesses has shifted from afflictions by evil spirits to dysfunction in neurophysiological processes. More recently, research has shown that infectious agents, such as viruses, can cause the neurophysiological dysfunction. Recent research shows viruses can persist undetected in the brain and cause a wide array of symptoms.

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