Understanding Teenage Anxiety: A Parent's Guide to Improving Your Teen's Mental Health

Anxiety is the most common mental-health disorder in the United States, affecting nearly one-third of both adolescents”—New York Times

If you’re the parent of a teenager experiencing chronic anxiety, you are not alone, and this book can help you. Today’s teens are high-strung and socially overextended. We shrug it off as a millennial problem, but is it? In a world that encourages the quick fix, instant gratification, and real-time feedback, can we really expect our children to cope as we did less than two decades ago, in the land of handshakes, eye contact, elbow grease, and grit?

This book is a product of a combination of three very different perspectives: those of the anxious teen, the parent, and the therapist. We need to understand what we’ve created in terms of our current society to gain proper insight on why we’re seeing increasingly rising levels of anxiety in our teenagers. Topics include:

• Physical and Emotional Symptoms of Anxiety
• Teens and Self-Harm
• Anxiety and Gut Health
• Sports: Concussions and Anxiety
• Natural Ways to Help Your Teen Cope
• And much, much more

Within each chapter, author (and parent) Jennifer Browne and co-author (Jennifer’s teenage son) Cody Buchanan, who struggles with anxiety and depression, will weigh in on what this affliction feels like, physically, mentally, and emotionally. They share personal experiences to help parents better understand their teens and learn a lot along the way.

Jennifer Browne is the author of several non-fiction works, including Happy Healthy Gut, Vegetarian Comfort Foods, The Good Living Guide to Medicinal Tea, and Baby Nosh. She’s currently working on a book on teenage anxiety and finds inspiration for her projects within her own experiences. Browne resides just outside of Vancouver, British Columbia with her dog and three children, one of whom shot the photographs for this book. Tweet her @jennifer_browne.

Cody Buchanan has personal experience with chronic anxiety. As a young teen, he suffered in silence for years, and he was sixteen before his condition became apparent to others, almost nineteen before treatment commenced. Buchanan is the oldest son of Jennifer Browne and agreed to participate in this project to help others better understand their anxious family members.