Aya is a 15-year-old Muslim girl. She attended the initial assessment with her mother. The family had reportedly moved from Turkey to the United States when Aya was very young. This had been a difficult time for Aya (e.g., learning a new language) and she reported missing her country and her friends. Her main concern was around a belief that she had cancer. She had visited her doctor many times and undergone numerous medical investigations, which had ruled out any physical cause. She held a number of dysfunctional assumptions (e.g., \u201cif someone has a bald head it means they have cancer\u201d). Aya’s anxiety was triggered when she saw\/heard about someone she believed to be unwell (e.g., on TV), or she had an intrusive thought\/image of illness. Her anxiety generated physical sensations (e.g., fast breathing), leading to hypervigilance. These symptoms of anxiety were then misinterpreted as a sign of serious illness (e.g., \u201cI have lung cancer\u201d). In order to manage these negative thoughts and feelings of anxiety, Aya carried out specific rituals (e.g., praying, repeating words\/numbers until it\u2019s \u201cright\u201d, washing her hands) and sought reassurance from her family and the medical profession. These behaviors were taking significant time out of her day to complete. Aya described feeling a huge amount of responsibility for keeping others around her safe from harm. Aya was attending school full time. However, her anxiety was starting to have an impact on her school work (e.g., not being able to write certain words linked to illness such as “sick” or “death”) and her friendships (e.g., increased reassurance seeking from her friends, asking them repeatedly if she is sick or if she has been contaminated). Her parents were concerned about her behavior. Her mother appeared supportive and attuned to her daughter’s needs. The family reported Aya’s symptoms started about two years ago and have gotten repeatedly worse over time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Aya is a 15-year-old Muslim girl. She attended the initial assessment with her mother. The family had reportedly moved from Turkey to the United States when Aya was very young. This had been a difficult time for Aya (e.g., learning a new language) and she reported missing her country and her friends. Her main concern […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10],"class_list":["post-106921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research-paper-writing","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106921"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106921\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/papersspot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}