The Daily Telegraph: The circuit breaker for children struggling with anxiety issues

Published in The Daily Telegraph written by Adella Beaini

This time last year, eight-year-old Fin Gledhill would have been unable to cope with a tough day school. He is one of 278,000 children across Australia struggling with clinical symptoms of anxiety. But, for the first time in Australia, help is now only a click away with an app launched this week to help treat the shocking rates of childhood anxiety and detect the problem early on. With more than 30 years experience, psychologist Dr Louise Metcalf co-designed the app Gheorg, with the help of 50 families and more than 600 students across schools in Sydney.

“I’m a mum as well as a psychologist and when I realised how much the rates of anxiety had increased over time, I knew that it had nothing to do with how well you parent your child,” Dr Metcalf said.

“I also knew how slow it is to create a single fully trained psychologist and how small the degree registrations and supervision registrar programs had become over the years. So it suddenly became clear to me that if we keep doing things the same way we always had, we would never be able to meet this rising demand to support these kids and their suffering would be unimaginably bad.”

The app is designed to fill the gap between a teacher or parent noticing and treatment being provided by a psychologist. The idea gained momentum when Dr Metcalf was selected into the award-winning start-up accelerator, SheStarts.

For Fin, who is also on the autism spectrum, his mum Cheryl said he had been struggling daily with the crippling illness which “affects everyone in the family”.

Mrs Gledhill believes the lifesaving app should be made available to every child, because she has seen first-hand how “crippling anxiety in kids can be”.