Professor Dave Coghill

We've just published actually the world's first evidence-based guidelines on treating anxiety in children and adolescents.

And when you look at those, what it will say is pretty much that medication should never be the first-line treatment unless the anxiety was extremely severe.

But even then, the first-line treatment, we say, actually is psychoeducation.

First line treatment is helping making sure that people understand what is anxiety, what anxiety is, how it affects people and also what it isn't.

The second line treatment would be a psychological therapy.

So cognitive behavioral therapy.

And I have ringing in my ears psychologists who say an only cognitive behavioral therapy with exposure.

So you expose people to the anxiety and you help them to manage that.

And actually, that's what works.

And so a lot of people get CBT, but they don't get the exposure part of it because that's a lot harder to do.

I say to you, Sonia, I'm going to tell you how to manage this, but I'm going to make you face your anxieties.

Oh, no, I don't want to do that.

And it's hard for me to convince you.

But without that exposure, it's not going to work properly.

Medication can be added to the psychological therapy and very, very rarely for people with very severe presentations where you feel that they're not going to be able to engage in the psychological therapies.

And so sometimes you would use them first.

But generally, and that's the same, that doesn't matter whether you're neurotypical

Or neurodivergent in the broadest sense.

Same argument would go.

We know that it's much more difficult for autistic people, for example, to engage in psychological therapy.