Are We Handling Anxiety all Wrong?
Our 'solutions' might be making things worse for our kids
The Problem
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that our teenagers face an epidemic of anxiety disorders. One out of every four adolescents now suffers from anxiety. And we're talking here about mental illness, not the run-of-the-mill stress, unease, and nerves that all teenagers experience. And this epidemic hasn't always been with us; in 2010, the number of teenagers with an anxiety disorder was only about one in ten.
How should we respond to this problem as a community? Ideally we should be looking to address the root causes, which are complex and will take both time and resources to tackle. But-- as a parent of a teenager myself-- I'm acutely aware that we also need to more immediately address the consequences of anxiety disorders in our kids who are already suffering from them right now. One of the strategies I commonly see, both in our schools and among parents I know, is a focus on avoiding the things perceived as triggering that anxiety. So, for example, if a kid's social anxiety seems particularly bad some days, parents might let them stay home from school; if a kid has a formal disability accommodation in school for anxiety, they might be allowed to leave class early to avoid the hallway rush of students (for social anxiety) or be allowed to avoid the regular classroom environment (for testing anxiety).
The Revelation
I have no relevant expertise in this area, so I never gave these strategies for addressing our kids' anxiety much thought. But then I recently learned that those who DO have such expertise all agree: avoidance is exactly the OPPOSITE of what you want to do to help kids with anxiety. I heard this first from Dr. Lisa Damour, a child development expert with a PhD in clinical psychology, on an episode of the podcast Death, Sex, & Money:
"[O]ne of the key principles in psychology-- and this is one of those areas where there's really no controversy in our field at all-- is that avoidance actually feeds anxiety. It actually makes it worse."
She goes on to note that of course avoidance feels good in the short term. But in the long term it actually compounds the anxiety by allowing pathological fears to go unchallenged by the real world and real experiences. "For school in particular," she notes, "avoidance REALLY accelerates anxiety quickly."
Woah. This was definitely news to me. So much so that I didn't believe it at first. So I did a little digging and sure enough, Dr. Damour is right; this is common knowledge among psychological experts. Dr. Jonathan Haidt, a well known social psychologist at NYU, puts it this way:
"According to the most-basic tenets of psychology, the very idea of helping people with anxiety disorders avoid the things they fear is misguided."
The Question
So now my question is this: Why do we react to kids with anxiety disorders by helping them avoid the sources of their anxiety, if it is well-understood by experts in psychology that this will actually make their anxiety disorder worse rather than better?
I'm genuinely puzzled by this, so would welcome input from experts, special ed teachers, parents who have dealt with their child's anxiety through the healthcare and school systems, etc.: What am I missing here? What is being left out of this story? What complexities am I not considering or context am I ignoring?
Otherwise, how could we be getting this thing-- which is so crucial to our teenagers and so widespread in our community-- so completely backwards?
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