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Phobia: Supporting children and young people with specific fears

20 September 2024
Volume 1 · Issue 1

Abstract

Research suggests that around 10% of children and teenagers have a specific phobia that significantly affects their mental health, functioning and development. Stephanie Thornton looks at the incidence, causes and interventions.

So far as mental health issues in children and adolescents go, depression and anxiety are ‘top of the bill’. These two often intertwined issues soak up much of the limited resource available for children's mental health. They are so prevalent that they are almost the ‘new normal’ for our young (Thornton, 2020). And perhaps, in some degree, they always were, and always will be. Both can be rational responses to a dangerous world and to our individual powerlessness. There is a good case to be made, in our very stressed lives, that, except in the minority of cases that meet the criteria of clinical disorder, anxiety and depression should not be medicalised, but rather, addressed as normal emotional responses that we should help our young to learn to manage in the face of our rapidly changing world.

The trouble with the prominence of our concern with anxiety and depression is that it absorbs resources and distracts us from other mental health issues which may be equally damaging, but more amenable to treatment – if the resources were available. One example would be specific fears or phobias.

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