Anxiety in children and young people; how is it diagnosed?


Anxiety can affect anyone, even the very young, but what exactly is it? Anxiety is often misrepresented, as it is more than simply ‘feeling stressed’ or ‘feeling worried’. Anxiety itself is a normal and often a healthy emotion. Feelings of anxiety will often invoke a fight-or-flight response in someone, and scientifically it is a survival response to dangerous or threatening situations, though it can cause some people to react more intensely than is necessary. It is when people experience disproportionate levels of anxiety that it becomes a medical disorder.

Anxiety becomes a problem when anxious feelings don’t go away when a stressful situation has passed, or the ‘stressor’ has been removed; when they’re ongoing and happen without any particular reason or cause. Physical symptoms can develop, such as increased blood pressure and nausea, concentration difficulties, sleep difficulties and restlessness or a feeling of being ‘on edge’ all the time.

In Australia, estimates that one in 14 children and young people experience anxiety, which can result from a range of contributing factors including difficult life experiences. Stay tuned over the next few weeks as we consider how anxiety develops in children and young people, what signs we can look out for, and what we can do to help.

The Wishing Well foundation





Support the Wishing Well


  • Funding availability





Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: