If you've felt yourself worrying more in the past few years, you're definitely not alone. In the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the global prevalence of depression and anxiety surged by an astounding 25 percent, according to a 2022 report by the World Health Organization. Children, unfortunately, are not immune to this worrying trend, either: More than five million 3-to-17-year-olds in the U.S. are currently diagnosed with anxiety, the most common mental health issue.
In response to this, the United States Preventative Task Force has issued a draft of guidelines recommending that kids as young as eight years old should be screened for anxiety. Not all experts agree, however, that this is necessarily the best course of action.
Judith Anderson, a health psychologist at the University of Toronto in Canada, says there’s a big difference between feeling on edge every so often and clinical anxiety. While the former is ...
