Emotional Lability: What Is It And What Are Its Symptoms?
If something characterizes emotions, it is that they come and go without, many times, having a specific cause that triggers them.. For example, a person may feel sad at a time when everything seems to indicate that they should be happy, or the opposite may also be the case.
So to speak, each person has a range of emotions that they usually express in a way that is relatively independent of their context. Some tend to experience more emotions with joy, and others less. However, sometimes the variation in emotions can be very significant. In those cases we talk about emotional lability.
The concept of emotional lability refers to a tendency to change quickly and abruptly in terms of emotional state.
When this psychological phenomenon occurs, emotions vary almost as if they followed the movement of a pendulum, although not necessarily with that regularity between periods.
Duration of mood swings
Emotional lability can be expressed in variations in emotion that are noticeable in a matter of hours, but it may also be the case that this change appears after several days of expressing the same emotion or a sequence of emotions that are very similar to each other.
In the same way, Sudden changes in emotions can follow one another for days until there comes a time when emotional lability returns to normal levels in which there are no such abrupt changes.
Emotional lability can be a useful propensity when approaching problems from different points of view. In fact, a certain degree of emotional lability is present in almost all people, since everyone has a range of habitual emotions.
However, in other cases it becomes so intense and sudden that beyond being a personality characteristic can be, in itself, a type of symptom of a mental disorder.
The mental disorders in which emotional lability is most common are the following:
1. Major depression
In major depression, one can go from phases of emotional flattening and anhedonia to others in which deep sadness appears that is experienced very intensely. In these cases, mood changes can generate relational problems, especially when they are associated with intense outbreaks.
2. Bipolar Disorder
It is a mood disorder characterized precisely by sudden changes in emotional states. Classically, in Bipolar Disorder, episodes of mania alternate, in which a feeling of euphoria and joy is manifested, and episodes of depression. In short, in this disorder emotional lability is one of the typical factors (provided there is mania and depression.
3. Cyclothymia
Although emotional lability is the quintessential symptom of Bipolar Disorder, the milder version of it, Cyclothymia, also presents it as a symptom. In these cases, the symptoms are not as intense as in other depressive disorders, they last for a longer period.
The causes of emotional variation
When emotional lability is very intense and interferes with the person’s quality of lifeit is possible that it is a symptom of a mental disorder or a neurological disorder. Although the causes depend on each case, it is understood that the very intense emotional lability associated with psychological problems appears when the limbic system (located in the brain) begins to function abnormally.
Patients with epilepsy, for example, may present emotional lability, since the attacks arise from an alteration in the overall functioning of the brain.
Treatment
It must be clear that emotional lability is not a mental disorder in itself, but rather a symptomand that is why it is not treated directly through psychological or psychiatric interventions. The health measures that can reduce it involve a diagnosis of possible mental disorders.
When the causes are not related to a diagnosed mood disorder, treatment will be more difficult to establish. Furthermore, the use of psychotropic drugs that can serve to reduce the intensity of the phases of emotional lability is something that depends on the specialized medical personnel handling each case.
