Anxiety is perhaps the most frequent symptom for which child psychiatrists are consulted.

There are many medications to choose from, and clinicians have their different styles of

working with this problem that vary depending on the situation.

While selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, SSRIs, are generally considered the mainstay

medications for anxiety, it's important to consider other

options, particularly because of SSRI's potential for side effects. In this podcast, Mara and I

will be discussing the pros and cons of the main categories of medications that clinicians

typically use to treat anxiety in children and adolescents.

I'm Dr. Josh Fader, the editor-in-chief of the Carlatte Child Psychiatry Report, and co-author

of the second edition of the Child Medication Fact Book for Psychiatric Practice.

And I'm Mara Government, a licensed clinical social worker in Southern California with a

private practice and an avid reader of Carlad Reports.

So what we're going to do is we're going to talk through our recently published

algorithm in that Child Med fact book for psychiatric practice

and kind of give you our go-by of how we approach anxiety disorders.

Dr. Fader, can you summarize what disorders we're looking at here?

Well, it's a good question because in 2020, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent

Psychiatry released their clinical practice guideline. That's sort of a newfangled way of

talking about the most recent research on anxiety disorders. And they were able to clarify that

in the literature, there's really just four that we think about together this way.

We're talking about social anxiety disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, separation anxiety disorder,

and panic disorder. Those are the ones where we have some decent information that allows us

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