Anxiety

People arrive at PHC describing anxiety in very different ways. Some talk about a mind that will not slow down — the same worry circling for hours, arriving uninvited at 3am, attaching itself to whatever is nearest. Others describe it almost entirely in the body: a chest that tightens before a meeting, a stomach that turns before an exam, sleep that comes late and breaks early.

Often it shows up first as something else. A parent notices a teenager has stopped wanting to go to school. Someone realises they have quietly stopped taking a particular road, stopped answering a particular number, stopped saying yes to things they used to enjoy — and that the list has been getting longer for a year.

Anxiety is an ordinary human response. It becomes worth attention when it stops being proportionate to what is actually in front of you, or when the effort of managing it starts costing more than the thing being managed.

Recognising yourself in a paragraph on a website is not the same as knowing what is going on. This page describes; it does not assess you, and there is nothing here for you to score yourself against.

There is no threshold you have to cross before you are allowed to ask. People book at PHC at every point on the range — some after one frightening episode, some after twenty years of assuming this is simply their personality.

What a clinician pays attention to is duration and cost. Anxiety present on most days for weeks or months, rather than around one identifiable event that has now passed. Anxiety that is changing what you do: the work you take on, the places you go, the conversations you have, the sleep you get. Anxiety the people close to you have started to notice and quietly work around.

Only a qualified clinician can tell you what is going on — a website cannot. What a page like this can tell you is that the question is a reasonable one to bring, and that bringing it earlier usually leaves more to work with.

PHC is an assessment-first practice. Before anyone begins therapy for anxiety there is an initial session, and its job is to work out what is actually happening rather than to start treating it.

1. An initial session We ask what has been going on, for how long, and what it is costing you. Nothing is administered before this conversation.
2. Emotional assessment and symptom screening A structured screening of emotional functioning and what you are presenting with, using internationally validated instruments. Its purpose is to decide which further tests, if any, are clinically warranted — you will not be given tests you do not need. Where the picture points somewhere else, such as a learning difficulty sitting behind exam anxiety, this is what finds it.
3. A psychologist matched to what the assessment found Psychologists at PHC are not assigned on availability. Assignment is based on speciality, your presenting needs and clinical fit.
4. Therapy, reviewed as it goes For anxiety the modality most often indicated is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), which PHC uses for depression, anxiety and negative thought patterns. Where trauma sits underneath, EMDR may be used alongside it. Sessions are 50 minutes, in clinic at our PECHS clinic or in DHA, or online.

• Panic attacks
• Social anxiety
• Sleep disturbance
• Emotional assessment
• CBT at PHC