If You Have Psoriasis Then Your Stress Is Worse, But Why?
Overview to The Topic
Hello everyone! My publication today will be talking about Psoriasis, and will go over its symptoms and levels but I will focus mainly on its relation with mental health and how does stress affect people who are diagnosed with Psoriasis in a worse way.
Why did I choose this topic? Because I myself have it also I noticed changes in its levels depending on my mental health: Depressed, stressed or happy and stress-free.
What's Psoriasis
Psoriasis is a chronic inflammatory disease that affect skin and joints mainly (Depending on its level). Until this day there is no specific cure for it, only drugs that are usually applied topically to reduce its symptoms that ranges from mild to something that might cover most of the body.
Psoriasis is diagnosed through its symptoms (Clinically) and those it actually has wide variety of symptoms so I will go over few of them.
Itching and dryness: One of the most obvious and famous symptoms of Psoriasis is dry spots that's usually associated with itching. It's gets more itchy if the person normally has dry skin, and sometimes those areas might start bleeding.
Various nails symptoms involving discoloration, thickness, and deformation. (Last year I did a surgery for my toe nail after it was formed and grew abnormally under the skin due to Psoriasis thickening parts of nail).
Source
3- Psoriatic arthritis. (Have no experience with this... Thankfully).
Relationship Between Psoriasis And Mental Health
This kind of relationship has both ways, where Psoriasis affects your mental health ( I will explain this later) and your mental health affects Psoriasis progression.
Let's start with the effect of mental health on Psoriasis. When you are stressed psoriasis symptoms goes worst, for instance the red/white dry spots will be appearing more and faster if you stop using medicines, also they will become more itchy. Personally, itching is in scalp and it's really annoying that's why nowadays I'm avoiding anything that might get me stressed (Like trading...* sigh*).
Now how does Psoriasis affect your mental health? Might sound weird but living with Psoriasis is somehow annoying because if you are someone who cares a lot about how they look like then you might start avoid going out just because you have forgot to use your medicines and some white dry spots are appearing so bad. Or maybe people who have to go out and their working or studying environment makes them an easy target for stress then they might start itching a little more or any other symptom might start going a little worse which is something unpleasant for sure.
In The End
Dealing with any disease especially chronic ones is really hard, especially that it requires some changes in the lifestyle like diet or maybe having a better control of mental health, not to mention the continuous use of medicines. In the case of mild to moderate Psoriasis, it's good enough to use topical therapy, and most of them have a quite fast effect. For me I use Cloderm for skin and Betnovate for scalp and they are working just fine, so don't hesitate to use meds when necessary.