Troubled Teenage Girls & Anxiety Disorder

Let's admit it, dealing with stress is just part of being a teenager. However, stress can become more than just an inherent stress of being a teenager; it can be an emotionally crippling disorder. Making it difficult to perform as fear of circumstances both identifiable and unknown overwhelms the ability to concentrate on other thoughts and causes apparent physical symptoms.

Adolescent girls who undergo anxiety disorder have great difficulty functioning in their everyday lives.

Anxiety in teenage girls can manifest itself in numerous ways. While adolescent anxiety conditions range in severity and traits, they are significant and can severely affect the lives of those who are afflicted.

Common Types of Anxiety That Affect Teenage Girls Include:

• General Anxiety: commonly experienced along with depression
• Acute Anxiety: Manifests itself before a stressful event
• Anticipatory stress: features the same bodily symptoms as severe anxiety yet is focused upon a foreseen negative result and often includes panic attacks
• Social Anxiety: the development of imagined embarrassment in front of or adverse reaction from one's peers

What Causes Anxiety in Teen Girls?

While you're an adolescent girl, feeling stress from time to time is common, and so are those sensations of anxiety and unsureness that come along with said anxiety. 

Those feelings of trepidation, panic, and over-worrying become emotionally crippling, and anxiety becomes a problem. Moreover, when an adolescent girl reaches this state of emotional depletion, it is time for her parents to seek remedial treatment for her anxiety dysfunction. 

Parent FAQ's 

Moms and dads often ask, "where does clinical anxiety come from?" While we wish there was one clear answer to give these parents, we can provide no clear-cut reason outright. The fact of the matter is that clinical stress can affect a child at any point during youth and various causes. 

While some people are genetically activated to develop anxiety disorders, there is no absolute indication of a hereditary cause. However, childhood trauma has been determined to correlate to having an anxiety disorder later in life.

Recognizing the Signs of Anxiety

Since every teen endures some form of anxiety, it is often difficult to diagnose an anxiety disorder outright. 

Parents of adolescent daughters often ask themselves, "is my child anxious from being a teenage girl, or is her stress so severe that she requires treatment from a specialist?" While these two scenarios may be challenging to classify, they are also crucial to adequately distinguish from one another.

The simplest way to distinguish clinical anxiety from normal stress? Pay attention to your daughter's behavior.

Teenage Girls Who Suffer From An Anxiety Disorder May Appear to be:

• Withdrawn - Girls who experience anxiety disorder symptoms may opt to be isolated from those they feel they do not fit in.
• Depressed - Untreated or undiagnosed anxiety commonly causes those afflicted to develop a co-occuring depressive disorder.
• Eating less: When an adolescent girl experiences anxiety, a loss of appetite is a prevalent symptom inherent to clinical anxiety.

Teenage Girls Who Suffer From an Anxiety Display The Following Self-Destructive Behaviors:

• Self-harm: Overly Anxious teens often hurt themselves by cutting or by some other means of self-harm.
• Acting impulsively: Anxiety disorder may cause a teenage girl to appear overly outgoing or strangely friendly compared to her normal behavior.
• Abusing drugs/harmful substances: Sadly enough, teenage girls often turn to narcotics or alcohol to cope with intense emotions like anxiety.

Treatment for Anxiety Disorder 

Anxiety is a particularly severe issue that requires substantial treatment. Without adequate treatment, an anxiety disorder can lead to self-sabotaging behaviors - most of which can result in life-altering, negative outcomes. 

If your child suffers from clinical anxiety, it is important to find the most efficient treatment to help her overcome her emotional crisis. While there are many therapy methods to choose from, the most proven type of practice is residential therapy for troubled teens, otherwise known as therapeutic boarding schools for troubled teens. 

For more information, please call us today.