Andrea's Teenage Anxiety

Andrea had the kind of school life that looks easy from the outside. Top grades, a wide circle of friends, no trouble talking to the boys everyone else was nervous around. Then the school board redrew the district lines. She was transferred to a different school, and the relationships she had spent years building were suddenly gone. The one message she wants other teenagers to hold onto is simple: anxiety does not check your status first. It can arrive for the cheerleader and the kid who loves math alike. Being popular buys you nothing against a panic attack.

At the new school she made friends quickly, and on paper things were fine. What confused her was the loneliness that crept in anyway. She was surrounded by people she genuinely liked, and still she felt isolated. The feeling sharpened over weeks until the building itself became hard to walk into. She started to dread every step toward it and every step inside it. This was new territory for her. She had always loved school, so the obvious question had no answer: why now?

The worry kept climbing. It got bad enough that she would end up in the bathroom, sick to her stomach. She began skipping class, sometimes an entire day, just to avoid the dread. Eventually she told her parents what was happening, and they took her to see every psychiatrist they could find in the area. One prescribed Ativan, an anti-anxiety medication, but it did not make the anxiety go away. Her parents pulled her out of class and arranged home-schooling, which was exactly the outcome Andrea had hoped to avoid. As a compromise, the plan was for her to attend at least one class a week and show up to social events three days a week so she could stay connected to friends and start forming new bonds.

Things came to a head during a fight with her parents. Andrea said she would run away; her father said fine, then there would be no home for her to come back to. She went to her weekly class that day, and when a panic attack hit she ended up crying by herself in the bathroom. She had left her Ativan at home. Her stomach ached, her chest burned like a bad case of heartburn, and her arms and legs would not stop shaking. She rode it out and had pulled herself together by the time her mother picked her up. At home she shut herself in her room to lower the noise of a draining day.

Still angry at both of them, she decided her mother at least deserved to understand what was going on inside her. In her words: 'Finally I mustered up the courage to tell my parents I had had another anxiety attack. Then, for the first time in my whole life, I saw BOTH my parents cry. It was then that I realized how much they cared about me, and how devastated they were that I had to go through something so awful. My mom told me that she felt depressed all the time because I was hurting so much and there was now way she could help me. It was then that I realized I had to face my fears.'

The medication kept taking the edge off when symptoms flared, and around the time she started seeing her boyfriend she sensed the current turning. Her psychiatrist, Dr. Smith, recommended she ease back toward full-time school and let herself settle into a life with new friends rather than mourning the old ones. Years on, the attacks are far less frequent. As Andrea puts it: 'Now that I'm older, I still get the occasional panic attack, maybe four or five times a year. But now I know how to control my anxiety, and how to make it work for my benefit. My anxiety no longer controls me, and I have the ability to worry when it's necessary and just relax when it's not.'

Pull someone's social connections out from under them and their sense of safety can collapse, and that kind of rupture can open the door to anxiety and panic attacks. For Andrea the way out was not any single prescription. The Ativan helped her get through the worst spikes, but what actually moved her life forward was building safe, steady relationships and finding the nerve to walk straight at what scared her. The original first-person account appears at http://www.experienceproject.com/stories/Am-A-Teen-With-Anxiety/129371.