Anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in the United States, and affect 18 percent of the adult population.
These disorders are also glamorized by youth. Visit any Tumblr page and one will see posts that cause others to think it is socially acceptable to live with social anxiety and to go untreated, or to self-medicate. If something has a strong negative influence in a person’s life, that person should get professional help. So, why do only one-third of people who suffer with these disorders receive treatment?
The reason one should not believe all of the hype about social anxiety is that the symptoms that accompany social anxiety are things that most everybody struggles with. Symptoms include experiencing distress in common situations, such as being the center of attention or being criticized. Feeling distressed in these situations is a completely normal response, and when someone feels this way, it doesn’t always help to put a label on it to justify it. Instead, each person who struggles in this area should work on being more comfortable in these trying situations.
Sometimes identifying as having a disorder can put a person in a rut. Instead of doing this, teens should view distress as a common problem that everybody needs to work on. Anxiety is a real problem, but the bigger problem is young people thinking something is wrong with them when they are perfectly normal. Stop glamorizing disorders and use this energy to help yourself and build others up.