Understanding Teenage Anxiety: A Parent's Guide to Improving Your Teen's Mental Health

by Jennifer Browne, Cody Buchanan

Overview

If you’re the parent of a teenager experiencing chronic anxiety, this book is for you.

Today’s teens are high-strung and socially overextended. We shrug it off as a millennial problem, but is it? In a world that encourages the quick fix, instant gratification, and real-time feedback, can we really expect our children to cope as we did less than two decades ago, in the land of handshakes, eye contact, elbow grease, and grit?

This book is a product of a combination of three very different perspectives: those of the anxious teen, the parent, and the therapist. We need to understand what we’ve created in terms of our current society to gain proper insight on why we’re seeing increasingly rising levels of anxiety in our teenagers. Topics include:

• Physical and Emotional Symptoms of Anxiety
• Teens and Self-Harm
• Anxiety and Gut Health
• Sports: Concussions and Anxiety
• Natural Ways to Help Your Teen Cope
• And much, much more

Within each chapter, author (and parent) Jennifer Browne and co-author (Jennifer’s teenage son) Cody Buchanan, who struggles with anxiety and depression, will weigh in on what this affliction feels like, physically, mentally, and emotionally. They share personal experiences to help parents better understand their teens and learn a lot along the way.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781510743663
Publisher:	Skyhorse
Publication date:	08/20/2019
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	216
File size:	959 KB

About the Author

Jennifer Browne is the author of several non-fiction works, including Happy Healthy Gut, Vegetarian Comfort Foods, The Good Living Guide to Medicinal Tea, and Baby Nosh. She’s currently working on a book on teenage anxiety and finds inspiration for her projects within her own experiences. Browne resides just outside of Vancouver, British Columbia with her dog and three children, one of whom shot the photographs for this book. Tweet her @jennifer_browne.

Cody Buchanan has personal experience with chronic anxiety. As a young teen, he suffered in silence for years, and he was sixteen before his condition became apparent to others, almost nineteen before treatment commenced. Buchanan is the oldest son of Jennifer Browne and agreed to participate in this project to help others better understand their anxious family members.

Table of Contents

Foreword ix

Introduction xi

1 An Anxious Generation 1

2 Symptoms and Types of Anxiety 13

3 The Teenage Brain 31

4 Genetics, Stress, and Anxiety 45

5 Head Injuries and Mental Health 55

6 Anxiety and Education 63

7 Helping or Hindering? 77

8 Anxiety and Gut Health 93

9 Natural Ways to Help Your Teen Cope 107

10 Medication for Anxiety 127

11 Self-Harm and Suicide 137

12 Care for the Caregiver 153

Resources 165

About the Authors 169

Acknowledgments 171

Index 173

Endnotes 181

Editorial Reviews

08/01/2019

One-quarter of children today, ages 13–18, struggle with an anxiety disorder, and 75 percent of them will never receive direct support from a qualified provider, assert mother-son coauthors Browne and Buchanan. Instead of receiving legitimate treatment, many teenagers self-medicate by abusing drugs as a way to avoid uncomfortable situations, as Buchanan did. Here, the author recounts the fear and stress of his childhood. Life for teens is competitive: chock-full of activities, academic challenges, and the pressure to get into college. In addition, cyberbullying, and social media that prompt kids to compare themselves constantly with others, have been linked with a spike in mood disorders. Smartphones may provide an additional distraction that plagues teens with social anxiety by allowing them to avoid in-person conversations and situations. VERDICT Addressing such crucial topics as self-harm, suicide, and integrating diet and natural remedies into one's routine, as well as traditional treatments such as cognitive therapy and SSRIs, this work offers a further unique perspective of a teenager working through anxiety.

Library Journal

11/01/2019

One-quarter of children today, ages 13–18, struggle with an anxiety disorder, and 75 percent of them will never receive direct support from a qualified provider, assert mother-son coauthors Browne and Buchanan. Instead of receiving legitimate treatment, many teenagers self-medicate by abusing drugs as a way to avoid uncomfortable situations, as Buchanan did. Here, the author recounts the fear and stress of his childhood. Life for teens is competitive: chock-full of activities, academic challenges, and the pressure to get into college. In addition, cyberbullying, and social media that prompt kids to compare themselves constantly with others, has been linked with a spike in mood disorders. Smartphones may provide an additional distraction that plagues teens with social anxiety by allowing them to avoid in-person conversations and situations. VERDICT Addressing such crucial topics as self-harm, suicide, and integrating diet and natural remedies into one's routine, as well as traditional treatments such as cognitive therapy and SSRIs, this work offers a further unique perspective of a teenager working through anxiety.–Julia M. Reffner, Richmond

School Library Journal