Treatments for Anxiety Disorders include evidence-based psychotherapies and in some cases, medications.  Accommodations within the school should be applied with the goal of improving function, not avoidance. 

 

 Youth with Anxiety Disorders will often use avoidance as a preferred coping strategy.  Avoidance makes the anxiety worse and limits a person's ability to deal with it.  Indeed, the basic therapeutic intervention for Anxiety Disorders is to help the young person learn to not avoid.  In the school setting, be sure that avoidance is not enabled.  If accommodations for an Anxiety disorder should be apart of the treatment plan, design to restore functioning so that accommodations are no longer needed.  They are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. 

-School Based Mental Health Literacy by Dr. Yifeng Weir and Dr. Stan Kutcher