By Eric Moskowitz, Bostonia, July 28, 2021
Near the end of the strangest school year of her life, Julia, a Newton North High School freshman, found herself scrolling an Instagram feed full of her friends posting COVID-vaccine selfies. Some boasted that they felt like superheroes, newly powerful. One said she could finally exhale, calling it her “first deep breath” in over a year. Neither captured what Julia was feeling as she worked up the nerve to get her first shot.
“I was really nervous that I was going to, like, fall out of the chair and die on the spot,” says Julia, a thoughtful 15-year-old who is a client in the Child and Adolescent Fear and Anxiety Treatment Program, part of BU’s Center for Anxiety & Related Disorders (CARD).
When Julia did get vaccinated, she used some CARD strategies she’d learned, like “detective thinking”—reflecting on the evidence and the more likely outcomes—to tame those worries that she might keel over during the 15-minute observation period.
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