General Anxiety Disorder: A Brief Summary

A story written by and about a teen named Rachel, describes her experiences finding out that she has general anxiety disorder and how she overcame it today. In her story, she includes that she was struggling with a relationship, school, fall play, musical, and soccer all at once and it was stressful for her. Rachel was a junior high school, at the time of her story, being involved in school and taking challenging courses to help her to become successful in the future. Her first sign that she knew something was wrong was when she was backstage during her fall play’s dress rehearsal. Rachel was thinking about her first, new relationship with her boyfriend, and all of a sudden thought she was inexperienced with relationships, since this was her first relationship, and she thought he was going
Rachel went to her parents, at first they thought she was anorexic since she could not keep her food down from being so overwhelmed. She felt misunderstood. “I wanted to eat, I wanted to feel full and healthy, but my body wasn’t letting me.” Things for Rachel got worse and worse, so her parents made her see a psychologist, where the doctor diagnosed her with General Anxiety Disorder (GAD). Things started to look up for Rachel, she learned techniques to help her overcome GAD, but it still wasn’t the place where she wanted to be. So her psychologist recommended her to see a psychiatrist, where he/she can prescribe medication to help her, which it did in the end. After these experiences, Rachel said, “Dealing with my anxiety has been one of the greatest challenges of my life, but I am better, stronger, and more confident person for everything I have gone through. I learned that living a life of fear is not living at all, and while obstacles may arise more than I’d like, there is no problem that I can’t handle. I’ve learned to take some risks and face my challenges head