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Teenage Anxiety and panic attacks

NAS80053

My 17 year old son has been suffering with severe anxiety for just under a year and has been receiving counselling for over 6 months. It has only just been suggested that he is on the autistic spectrum and having completed the initial online questionnaire he scored quite highly. This has been a shock for him and us his family. He struggles to stay in school as he is studying for his A levels because of the anxiety and panic attacks. The counselling has helped him learn different ways to overcome this and he is doing absolutely everything he can to help himself, working out, getting fresh air, meditating, but now he is aware of being autistic feels that anxiety is how he is always going to feel. We all feel that this has explained his social behaviour growing up and he does too and he is trying to be positive but now feels almost trapped with this anxiety as it is described as something autistic people suffer badly with.
Can anyone offer any advice for how a teenager can look ahead and overcome strong anxious feelings?

Parents

  • It would be useful for your son to get a formal clinical diagnosis, as this helps to unlock accommodations from schools, universities and employers. However, some things may be available with a self-identification as autistic, backed up by clinical opinion.

    Yes, higher levels of anxiety are common in autistic people, but, with some self-knowledge and coping strategies, the level of anxiety can be kept at bearable levels. I am diagnosed as autistic, with Generalised Anxiety Disorder and social anxiety/phobia. However, I have had a productive and meaningful life. I am married with two talented and intelligent neurodivergent children. I have a PhD in molecular biology and had a 34 year-long career in scientific research. Both autism and its attendant anxiety cause problems that are non-existent for most people, but they do not automatically mean that you have to live a fundamentally circumscribed and unhappy life. 

  • in reply to Martin

    Thank you Martin for your reply. It’s encouraging to hear what you have achieved in your personal life as well as your professional career. My son is very bright so has high ambitions it’s just a case of adjusting to this new information we have and choosing the best pathway for him to achieve this.

    Thanks again.

  • in reply to NAS80053

    You are very welcome. It is working out strategies for minimising anxiety that is the difficult part. Once you have a strategy that works it can be trotted out any time it is needed. As part of my job I had to give occasional seminars and other forms of public speaking - on one occasion to around 250 people in the Natural History Museum. I found ways to cope. If I stood still, I would get the 'rabbit in the headlights' effect, so I always moved about when speaking. I always had lots of visuals to deflect some of the attention from me. The usual advice to pick a member of the audience out and deliver the talk to them, does not work with autistics, as talking to one stranger is almost as nerve-wracking as talking to a room-full of them. I just treated the audience as an amorphous mass and that helped a lot. It takes a lot of trial and error to develop useful strategies to cope with anxiety, but it is well worth trying.

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  • in reply to NAS80053

    You are very welcome. It is working out strategies for minimising anxiety that is the difficult part. Once you have a strategy that works it can be trotted out any time it is needed. As part of my job I had to give occasional seminars and other forms of public speaking - on one occasion to around 250 people in the Natural History Museum. I found ways to cope. If I stood still, I would get the 'rabbit in the headlights' effect, so I always moved about when speaking. I always had lots of visuals to deflect some of the attention from me. The usual advice to pick a member of the audience out and deliver the talk to them, does not work with autistics, as talking to one stranger is almost as nerve-wracking as talking to a room-full of them. I just treated the audience as an amorphous mass and that helped a lot. It takes a lot of trial and error to develop useful strategies to cope with anxiety, but it is well worth trying.

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