The Anxious Middle/High School Adolescent

This chapter provides an overview of anxious middle/high school adolescents who have difficulty attending school due to substantial anxiety in social and performance situations. The chapter focuses on understanding the feeling, thinking, and doing parts of distress, easing physical feelings of distress through better breathing and relaxation, dealing with the thinking part of distress, and managing the doing part of distress by gradually reintroducing a child to school and increasing his time in the classroom. The chapter is designed to educate parents about these parts of distress and presents strategies for addressing each one. These strategies emphasize cognitive strategies to replace distressing thoughts with more realistic thoughts. The chapter also covers special topics and circumstances that are common to this type of situation.