With an anxiety disorder, the anxiety is daily, if not multiple times a day. It can happen during the day, or it can wake you out of a sound sleep. The symptoms are countless; heavy breathing, weakness, dizziness, vomiting, racing heart, migraines, mental exhaustion and a list of symptoms that can go on for pages. Once the attack is over, exhaustion sets in.
An easy target for judgment or shame, so many families in crisis struggle alone, afraid or embarrassed or just too exhausted to reach out. Society expects three-year-olds to act like raging lunatics, but yet we don’t know what to do with a teen that has debilitating anxiety attacks.
Then there is the very real reality of mental illness and emotional disorders that many teens are battling. If a child had liver failure, we would support those parents wanting to go to the ends of the earth for medical care. We would be the greatest support network, and all the earth would rally to fight for their health. Yet, so many of our teens are physically broken in their minds and hearts. But instead of a chorus of support, their families receive silence or judgment or disappointment which compounds grief and lays a heavy yoke on those who are already suffering.
It is your 7-year-old enduring two months of bedtime vomiting because she thinks she may have ate something that would cause her to die.
