DD has been suffering with anxiety for a while now. I can’t remember exactly when it started as it has presented in different ways, so I didn’t at first notice that they were linked.
For example she became obsessed with hand washing but it seemed understandable as they were constantly being made to wash their hands in school before they went into lockdown. This did calm down. She later become obsessed with the thought of accidentally weeing when swimming and refused to get in the pool for ages, but after another lockdown she seemed to forget about this and it isn’t an issue now.
Last spring/summer she because very anxious again and was generally fine while at school and when in a routine (sports after school etc) but seemed to get really down in the holidays when not as distracted.
She had an incident at school last year when she was eating a sandwich and couldn’t swallow it properly and thought she was going to choke. This turned into a bit of a panic attack. She then didn’t eat properly for about a week as she was so worried about choking. Eventually this improved but now whenever she gets anxious she has trouble eating as her throat feels constricted.
She will be crying with hunger and be unable to eat. I will make her smoothies etc and she will very slowly sip them to at least get something into her.
She was awful over the Christmas holidays, so upset and crying all the time. She has started having intrusive thoughts that she is going to hurt herself or someone else. We had a few days away at new year and she really perked up and was excited to go back to school, but then two days after returning she got covid so had to stay off again and she was terrible. She is back now but hasn’t bounced back as usual.
She is crying every morning and evening about the thoughts. I’ve read back on some old threads and I’m trying to support her as best I can but I sometimes wonder if I’m making it worse.
We have spoken to the gp who was happy to refer her to camhs but did say it could be months and months, so we are arranging to see someone through our private medical. But everyone is so booked up so I think it will be at least another month.
I’m just worried as normally she is fine once back at school but not this time and she keeps saying she is having thoughts about killing herself, but she doesn’t want to. She won’t help me if I ask her to do some cooking with me to distract her as she is scared of being around knives.
She isn’t on any social media and has loads of friends and no issues at school at all. I’ve spoken to her teacher last year and this year who said she is happy and popular and they were quite surprised.
Any advice would be very welcome.