Alive and Well is brought to you by Pine Rest Christian
Mental Health Services.
According to the National Institute of Mental Health,
in any given year, an estimated 18% of adults,
20% of teens, and 13% of children ages 8 to 15
have anxiety disorders causing such distress
that it interferes with day-to-day living.
Women are 60% more likely to have
an anxiety disorder than men.
And the average age for onset for anxiety,
just 11 years old.
Now that's a lot to sort out.
And here to help shed some light on all of it
is Dr. Greg Malice, a psychologist with Pine Rest.
Good morning, it's good to have you here.
Good morning, I'm glad to be here.
Anxiety, I know there are different kinds.
Do they all present in the same way?
No, so anxiety is sort of a catch-all term
for a lot of different things.
And what people often don't realize is that anxiety
in general is a normal, typical human emotional response
to things like stress or pressure or worry.
We have anxiety disorders when the anxiety that we experience
becomes so problematic or so intense
that it starts interfering with our ability to function
in the way that we want to.
In what ways, describe that.
So some people with significant anxiety or anxiety disorders
worry so much about things that they can't actually
get anything done.
Some people have so much worry that they have panic attacks
and it feels like, they feel internally
like they're going to die, which is, as you can imagine,
a pretty scary thing.
Also scary is the fact that onset is like 11 years of age.
So is there a proclivity in certain people
to develop this disorder?
Yeah, there are some people who, as I describe,
are sort of more anxious on that anxiety spectrum.
They just have that trait of anxiety.
But our society really runs us in an anxious direction.
We tend to worry about things as a society.
We tend to worry about getting places,
about doing things, about doing well,
about how people will respond to us,
about what people think about us.
All of those things can contribute to the development
of an anxiety disorder.
I imagine that in children, it plays itself out quite differently
than in adults, right?
To describe a little bit of that.
So with kids, they don't have the ability
to describe what their experience is as well as adults do.
So for kids, a lot of times anxiety is experienced
kind of internally or as we would describe semantically.
So they experience a lot of headaches,
a lot of stomach aches, a lot of more physical symptoms.
In kids, we also see that the anxiety tends to present
as more irritability or rigidness.
You can probably see that in some of the kids
you're familiar with of tantrums
or those sorts of things.
It's not always anxiety, but if you start to see it a lot
and in a regular pattern, we would start to look at anxiety
as a cause for that.
What about treatment?
Is it the same for children and adults and men and women?
Well, again, with adults, we tend to do a lot more talk therapy
and with kids, it's a little bit more difficult to do that.
Really, with treatment for anxiety in kids,
we want to work a lot with the parents to try and figure out
how we can talk to our children to help them identify
what some of their fears and anxieties are
and then how to deal with them more effectively.
I think conversations like this are so important
because there's a lot of stigma around anxiety,
which often is accompanied by depression as well, right?
They often come together.
Yep, they co-occur a lot and sometimes you have anxiety
and it leads to depression.
Sometimes you have depression and it leads to anxiety
or sometimes you just sort of have both at the same time.
And the stigma piece probably prevents a lot of people
from finding help.
Yeah, or they start to feel badly about it
and they experience anxiety,
they feel badly about experiencing anxiety
and then they experience more anxiety.
And it compounds itself.
Well, if you'd like to learn more about anxiety
and finding help, Pine Rest has a whole section
of their website dedicated to the topic.
We have put a link to it on our site.
Go to wzzm13.com.
You'll find it there.
It's good to have you here.
Glad to be here.
Alright, well, thank you guys, have a great evening.
