They fear that something bad might happen to that person and the person will never return, leaving them alone and unprotected, explained Rachel Merson, PsyD, clinical director of the Child and Adolescent Fear and Anxiety Treatment Program at Boston University’s Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders. Children may be reluctant or refuse to go out or sleep away from home without the caregiver and may experience nightmares about separation. Separation anxiety disorder: Particularly common in younger children, this intense fear of being separated from a primary caregiver goes beyond the developmental norm.These youth may experience physiological anxiety reactions such as upset stomach, muscle tension, difficulty relaxing, difficulty falling asleep, difficulty concentrating, and feeling fatigued or on edge. These kids “are worried across the board-about their performance, their friend group, their health, their pet’s health, their parents’ health,” said Ellen Flannery-Schroeder, PhD, who heads the Child Anxiety Program at the University of Rhode Island and specializes in treating anxiety disorders. Generalized anxiety disorder: This is pervasive worry or anxious feelings across all domains of life.The most common anxiety disorders in children and teens are:

Those conditions are now listed separately, though they often overlap with anxiety disorders. That is a change from the DSM-4, which included obsessive-compulsive disorders and trauma-based symptoms within the anxiety disorders category. The current iteration of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (Fifth Edition), the DSM-5-TR (text revision), lists 11 anxiety disorders in total.

“And they will take the skills they learn with them for the rest of their lives.” The right treatment provides struggling youth with “a powerful way to start to understand the world and to face new and hard challenges,” Boger said. Boger, PhD, ABPP, co-founder of the McLean Anxiety Mastery Program at McLean Hospital and co-founder and chief clinical officer of InStride Health, a new virtual company that broadly disseminates evidence-based anxiety and OCD treatment to young people. When kids get appropriate treatment for anxiety, it can make an enormous difference in the trajectory of their lives, said Kathryn D. And thanks to increased public awareness about mental health issues, stigma surrounding anxiety is down, and psychologists say more parents are open to seeking anxiety treatment for their children. Preventive Services Task Force recommended that all young people ages 8 to 18 receive regular screening for anxiety. 26, 2008).Īnother positive development is that the medical community is seeing the value of homing in on anxiety disorders: In April, a group of experts making up the independent U.S. Walkup, MD, Kendall, and colleagues, 60% of young people who received a full dose of tailored cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)-a program called “Coping Cat”-improved significantly, and those numbers rose to 80% when they also took sertraline (Zoloft), an anti-anxiety medication ( New England Journal of Medicine, Vol. In a major randomized controlled study by John T.

Factors exacerbating this problem include long waiting lists to see a psychologist, a dearth of trained providers, and a disproportionate lack of access to quality care for low-income individuals and people of color, according to those who study and treat these disorders.īut for children and parents who find the right care, there is great news: “There are effective treatments for anxiety disorders, and those treatments are pretty darn good,” said Temple University’s Philip Kendall, PhD, who directs the Child and Adolescent Anxiety Disorders Clinic there. These soaring numbers are clashing with a major crisis in mental health provision, and most children and teens with anxiety disorders are not getting the help they need. Besides Covid-related stressors like social isolation, missed milestones, and increased family tension, background stressors such as school shootings, political unrest, and the war in Ukraine have likely fueled these increases. But during the pandemic, those numbers nearly doubled, such that 20.5% of youth worldwide now struggle with anxiety symptoms, according to a meta-analysis of 29 studies reported in JAMA Pediatrics (Vol. About 11.6% of kids had anxiety in 2012, up 20% from 2007. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, growing numbers of young people were experiencing high rates of clinical-level anxiety.

Fear of growing up into adulthood