Let's talk about depression and anxiety
Dec 14, 2023Welcome back!
Since last week's podcast/YouTube episode became this week's episode, I decided to publish two episodes this week. Now I kind of feel caught up!
While it's not fun to talk about depression and anxiety, I feel like it's definitely necessary.
I looked at research regarding anxiety and depression amongst kids with autism and ADHD. The statistics were all over the place, but the bottom line is that everything I saw and read backed up the fact that autistic and ADHD kids are significantly more likely to struggle with these disorders than neurotypical kids.
In this episode I talk about not only what depression and anxiety look and feel like (I used to struggle significantly with both), I also share my top strategies and suggestions for each.
Here's a clip from the episode:
There's so much stress around November and December. It's kind of counterintuitive, but you think about, for adults, the stress around making plans: Where are you going? What are you going to do? You know, sometimes there's stress around family dynamics. There could be stress around if your kiddo's currently in a difficult phase of their life, you could feel stressed out about what might happen at Thanksgiving dinner. What are they going to say? What are they going to do? How's everybody else going to react to them? If you're traveling, that's just always a little bit stressful in itself. There could be financial stress, as we come into the gift giving season, there can be financial stress there. Kids are off from school a lot during this time. The time during Thanksgiving, some of us have a whole week off at Thanksgiving, a couple of weeks at Christmas... There's a lot of downtime for our kiddos, the weather is colder, there's just a lot of things. The weeks before the holiday break, schools tend to do more laid back, casual stuff, and that's actually, for a lot of our kids, it's very difficult for them because it's out of routine, it's off structure, it can be kind of chaotic, it can be kind of overwhelming. So the last few days before the break may actually be kind of stressful and chaotic for them. So just understanding that pretty much everybody experiences heightened levels of stress in November/December.
Listen to the podcast episode.
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