Abstract
Health-related fear is a normal and common response in the face of the global pandemic of COVID-19. Children and young people are frequently being exposed to messages about the threat to health, including from the media and authorities. Whilst for most, their anxiety will be proportionate to the threat, for some, existing pre-occupation with physical symptoms and illness will become more problematic. There is a growing body of evidence that health anxiety may occur in childhood, however much of the literature is taken from research using adult samples. This practitioner review aims to give an overview of the assessment and treatment of health-related worries in children and young people in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. This review is based on the limited existing evidence in this population and the more substantial evidence base for treating health anxiety in adults. We consider the adaptations needed to ensure such interventions are developmentally appropriate.
Highlights
Worries about health are a common human experience thought to fall along a continuum in the general population (Salkovskis and Warwick, 2001)
Changed to ‘illness anxiety disorder’ in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual [DSM-5; American Psychiatric Association (APA), 2013], the term health anxiety (HA) is still in common use by mental health professionals as this refers to the evidence-based cognitive behavioural model of HA that is used in research and clinical settings (Salkovskis et al, 2003; Warwick and Salkovskis, 1990)
HA has a significant impact on functioning in children and young people; health-related anxiety symptoms have been found to be significantly positively associated with mental health problems across a range of age groups (Rask et al, 2012; Rask et al, 2016; Sirri et al, 2015)
Summary
Worries about health are a common human experience thought to fall along a continuum in the general population (Salkovskis and Warwick, 2001). We seek to extrapolate evidence from the HA literature to inform how health-related worries in children and young people may be managed in practice, and how this might relate to infectious disease pandemics such as COVID-19.
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