How do You Help Your Teenager with Anxiety?
Emotionally Reactive? Intense? Frustrated? Dr. Alice Charach discusses the case of one teenage client dealing with anxiety, loss of sleep, and trouble controlling moods.
Transcript
One of the persons that comes to mind is a young woman that I actually have known for about 10 years now. When I first met her and her family they were really having a lot of difficulties where they’re, with this. She was a very emotionally reactive person, extremely intense. When things didn’t go well she got very frustrated and would end up in tears, fighting with her brothers or with her mother.
Someone else had thought she could benefit from some medication. They came to me and they started discussing is this the best one? Is there another one that we should work on? What can we do differently? The other piece is to really try and optimize the other kinds of interventions that she was getting. At that time there wasn’t, they were in some family therapy. So that was a piece that was important. So as she got older, kind of in her early teenage years. Some of that frustration was certainly present and she continued to have lots of tough times in schools. It became more clear how anxious she was. How nervous she was in all kinds of social settings and and also she got very anxious about about whether she would do well in school. So as soon as there was something she was gonna have to do that was a little different, she just would fall apart and it would interfere with her sleep and it interfered with the how grumpy she was at home.
Do Social Skills Groups Help?
So one of the pieces that we also were able to help add to her, not us personally, but we referred her to an agency that worked with kids with both learning problems as well as ADHD and she participated in a social skills group that I think was really really helpful with other young teen girls, and so that was really helpful. Then from there you know she was better but then she would really struggle more, so we’re now moving into adult… into high school so in high school that was tremendously difficult. The organizational challenges, the several different teachers she had to manage. She had to be willing to tell them that she was taking medication and what was that like.
But it turns out she really grew into a very charming sociable lovely young woman. So one of the things that was helpful during that period of time was in some cognitive behavioural therapy targeting her anxiety symptoms while she was, and we also over that time we’re continuing the stimulant medication. So I would see her every three four five months depending on what was going on. At least a couple times a year and you know we’d talk about the overall picture and we talked about specifically the medication, but I also knew she was seeing someone regularly for her anxiety.
Teen Doesn’t Want to Take Medication
Just to get get her thoughts and concerns off her chest. She wasn’t really keen on doing what her parents asked her to do, and one of those things that she wasn’t keen on was taking medication, but then she kind of got used to it and she saw how she was functioning with it. So it became a part of what she did want to do. This is who I am I work best when I continue to use the medication and of course she was also in therapy which I think helped enhance this ability to see herself. So that now her picture of herself is one of okay I need to think hard about organizing but I can do it. I need to think about you know about trying hard to remember what I need to for an exam or or whatever, but I can do it.
So she’s gotten that sense of confidence from seeing herself doing it. She was really, she could have tipped another way, she might have seen herself go into a much deeper spiral.
Rick Green: hope you enjoyed that video. We enjoyed making it so even if you didn’t it was still good, but if you did enjoy it please like, share, and of course subscribe to the channel. And if you can become a subscriber to https://www.patreon.com/TotallyADD at any amount it makes all the difference in allowing us to be independent.
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