Anxiety Disorders In High School

The novel “It’s Kind of a Funny Story” by Ned Vizzini says a lot about adolescent mental illness and how teenagers cope with stress. The main character, Craig Gilner, is a freshman in the Executive Pre-Professional High School, the most prestigious school in his area. He studied for weeks to pass the test to get in, but once he succeeded he felt overwhelmed by school work and anxiety until he stopped eating, started doing drugs, and eventually admitted himself into a mental health ward for suicidal thoughts. Of course, I’ve never experienced that kind of severe depression or been in a mental ward, but I could easily relate to Craig as a teenager with my fair share of school-related stress. Craig shared a lot of qualities with me, like his ambition, social life, and many aspects of his personality.

What is anxiety? Well there is multiple types of anxiety. For example, there is social anxiety disorder, panic disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, separation anxiety and many, many more . What many do not know is that anxiety is a disorder that affects 18% of the people in the united states of the age 18 and older . But what about the younger people mainly middle schoolers? When you have anxiety throughout your life and wonder where it starts it might just start in middle school.

Social anxiety is the third largest physiological sickness in America, behind depression and Alcoholism. A website dedicated wholly to social anxiety claims that: “Social anxiety is the fear of being judged and evaluated negatively by other people, leading to feelings of inadequacy, inferiority, embarrassment, humiliation, and depression” (Social anxiety Institute). Social anxiety is common in our society currently. Many say it’s because of social media. The pressure of coming out of your own shell of strangers behind a screen and having to go out in the real world. Social anxiety is mostly shown at school, for adolescents, and the adolescent having to see other children all day, and almost every day. Having a social anxiety disorder can usually lead to having Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Having O.C.D, in some cases, means there is no control in life, and the diagnosed patient must keep

Everywhere you turn mental health is the talk of the world. To better understand this growing epidemic, it is said that mental health involves your emotional, psychological, and social well-being (CDC 2009). Have you ever been stressed out and lost your train of thought, you mind seems unclear and you feel in a daze. While mental health also affects the way in which one thinks, feel and act (CDC, 2009). It also includes how we handle stress, relate to others, and make choices. For this reason mental health amongst adolescents is essential at every stage of life, from childhood and adolescence through adulthood.

Anticipation of the unknown is a true explanation for most of a freshman’s anxiety upon entering high school. Is it anticipation? Compared to the feelings that are acquired throughout a student’s high school tenure and being a senior, most freshmen do not realize the great amount of work that lies ahead. The amount of homework, activity participation, sport participation and worries of achieving and maintaining a good grade develops tension. Though, throughout the years these students are molded-by their work, their parents, and their peers. So what do juniors and seniors in American high school deal with? What have their stress levels become-- and why?

Teenage mental-health severely impacts a developing child's success in school and their day-to-day lives. Issues like depression and suicide need to be explored in our education because many are being affected.

The high standards of students are unreasonable. It increases stress levels which affect our mental health, physical capabilities, and social life. Chronic levels of stress can lead to depression, anxiety disorders, and PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). An average teen’s stress level is 5.8/10, as opposed to an adult’s, which is 5.1/10. Furthermore, 30% of teens are sad or depressed because of stress, 31% are overwhelmed because of it, 23% have skipped meals, and 34% expect their stress levels to rise in the near future. Stress can also affect your nervous reactions,

I have always felt an overwhelming sense of worry in trivial situations- more so since entering high school- but it wasn’t until my freshman year that I began to realize that this sense of worry was not commonplace among my peers, ultimately driving me to do further research and discover that this sense of worry was indicative of anxiety. Throughout high school, my concern over my grades and my GPA led to an intense amount of test anxiety, consuming my thoughts and oftentimes causing me to dread coming to school. I have been working on lessening this test anxiety throughout my senior year this year, reminding myself that tests do not define one’s worth or intelligence, and I have noticed an overall increase in my mood and a decrease in my stress

I mean that in that most people are not aware of social anxiety, but it impacts about 18% of the U.S adult population, and this excludes other mental illnesses(Woodworth n. pg.). Those adults with social anxiety was most likely developed in adolescents meaning that some adults have been dealing with social anxiety with upwards of ten years. There are a few different factors that go into a person developing social anxiety and why adolescents is the most common age for social anxiety to develope that I will discuss in later paragraphs.

If you’re in school or remember when you were, you probably know or remember the stress, anxiety and the constant overwhelming feeling of compiling, remembering and trying to complete all the tasks on your “to-do list”. The problem still persists today, but input from students, teachers, parents, and counselors are having medical professionals worried. Not just about the ability to perform academically but for the well-being of the students. Schools are creating a stressful environment for America’s teenagers that is proving to take a negative toll on them.

Along with depression, the amount of students experiencing crippling anxiety has experienced a sharp increase. In recent years, it has surpassed depression as the top reason students seek out counseling and therapy; and has become the most common mental health disorder in the United States with nearly 30 percent of adults and adolescents being affected. Just as was seen with depression, within the last decade, studies have found marked increases in the amount of high school students who reported overwhelming anxiety. The American College Health Association found that anxiety levels had grown from 50 percent of high schoolers in 2011 to an astonishing 62 percent in 2016. (NYT) The sharp rise in mental illness in adolescents has manifested itself

In my personal opinion, this topic falls under two domains, cognitive and psychosocial. Anxiety disorders fall under cognitive because they affect your brain. The impact of anxiety on the brain can cause things such as, “crippling focus upon negative life-events and making concentration difficult.” (Robinson, Oliver J., Katherine Vytal, Brian R. Cornwell, and Christian Grillon.). Anxiety can slowly deteriorate your thought processes and ability to make cognitive, rational decisions. Which in turn also leads to other negative affects such as irrational fears, negative thinking, over-thinking, etc.. Anxiety also falls under the psychosocial

According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America anxiety disorders are the most common type of mental illness and affect 40 million people, 18 years or older in the United States alone. That is about 18% of the total United States population. With these high statistics one may find it difficult to differentiate oneselves from being shy or mentally ill. Anxiety is just a the tree trunk for many other branches. Anxiety disorders, to name a few, include Generalized Anxiety disorder (GAD), panic disorder, specific phobia disorder, post traumatic disorder, and social anxiety disorder (SAD) being the most common among teens.

So what exactly is this anxiety thing? Is it an excuse for students to skip school because they feel scared or overwhelmed by their expectations? Not exactly, no. While students tend to be truant and reluctant to attend school, they cannot exactly help it. Now: What is anxiety? “Anxiety is a natural human response to a tense or hazardous situation” (Nadelson, 9). How is school a tense or hazardous situation, you may ask. Important tests, bullying, homework, even social groups can create standards to live up to, which creates anxiety for

My day just started and I’m already beyond stressed; I had to wake up, fix my hair, put on makeup, find my suit, and then bring myself here, ugh. As a high school student, I can say that I go through a good bit of stress trying to juggle advanced placement classes, clubs, maintaining a social life, and literally everything else; it seems like I never get a break. According to the American Psychological Association, high school students rank a score of 5.8 on a ten point scale of stress during the school year, whereas adults rank as a 5.1. To put those scores in context, the healthy level for a high school student is a score of 3.9. Clearly teens are inundated with high levels of stress though the adults around them often refuse to acknowledge that fact. Today I would like to give you a peek into the hazards of teen stress by classifying a few well known stressors, analyzing the side effects of those stressors, and following that up with solutions to relieving some of this stress.