‘My 13yo son has a panic attack at the thought of attending school every day’

“I guess you could call it an episode … he bangs his head against the car seat. It’s not a good experience,” says distressed Melbourne mum Kristelle. 

Sarah looks like any other high school student. 

Living in Melbourne, the 16-year-old was once high-achieving, motivated by learning and popular with friends at school. 

Then the pandemic hit, forcing her to study at home for over a year. Now, she can barely get out of bed in the morning.

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RELATED: How to navigate your way through a panic attack

Sarah was once an outgoing student. Now it's "kind of impossible" to go to school without an anxiety attack. Source: ACA

“I couldn’t get out of the car … I felt frozen”

“I was very, like, outgoing and did a lot of things before the lockdowns,” she told A Current Affair. 

“It wasn’t until the lockdowns, where we were at home a lot, that I started not wanting to go out and, in fact, getting really anxious about going out.” 

But after spending months years behind a screen during lockdown, Sarah has developed terrible anxiety. 

Once lockdowns ended, her mental health became so problematic she missed roughly half of her school year. 

This isn’t your typical wagging school phenomenon, which is certainly nothing new. For Sarah, it felt “kind of impossible” to go to school, as if her body was physically stopping her from getting into her uniform. 

“Some of my hardest days, I’d just be having panic attacks all morning and couldn’t move,” she said. “Even if I’d get to school in the car, I couldn’t get out … I felt like, frozen.” 

RELATED: Nocturnal panic attacks: Why mums wake up at 4am with anxiety

Gabby's parents have since let their son study at home. Source: ACA

Students are “losing the will to live” due to school-related anxiety

It's not just Sarah who has developed a sense of dread at the thought of school.

Parents of another Melbourne student, Gabby, who struggled with school-related anxiety, said he would be dressed and ready to go to school, only to freeze up and experience an anxiety attack when he was about to exit the car. 

“I guess you could call it an episode … he bangs his head against the car seat. It’s not a good experience,” his mum Kristelle said. “He’s missed over 80 days of school.”  

Gabby has since left school, opting to study at home to avoid his intense panic attacks. 

It’s an issue that affects kids of all ages, “from all walks of life and from all neurodiverse and neurotypical backgrounds,” said mental health social worker John Chellew. 

However, not all cases of anxiety are born equal. 

“In the worst-case scenarios, I'm dealing with children who have pretty much shut down and gone on strike and who are locked in their bedrooms,” he told ACA. 

“In some cases, children have lost the will to live and are really threatening to end their lives.” 

John Marsden, principal at an alternative Melbourne school and children’s author, believes kids’ lives have become “far more intense and claustrophobic” and are now “supervised and scrutinised” at a higher rate than other generations, which may cause spikes of school-related anxiety. 

“That’s making it difficult for them to cope when they’re put in a different environment,” he said, adding that parenting could be the crux of the issue. 

“I think there is a pandemic of child abuse in Australia, which no one will confront or talk about, but it’s invisible because it’s not abuse of the body,” he said. 

“People are clothing their children adequately … or they are looking after their food and they’re looking after their schooling. But, what’s happening is damage to the inner self.”

Originally published as ‘My 13yo son has a panic attack at the thought of attending school every day’