Social anxiety is a mental health disorder, also known as social phobia. Its name is pretty self explanatory, It is defined as a disorder where and individual has an excessive and "unreasonable" fear of social situations. Anxiety in this sense is an intense nervousness and self-consciousness, the fear of being closely watched, judged and criticized by others. Social anxiety affects about 1 in 5 teenagers, that's 20% of all teenagers alone, not including the number of adults also affected by this disorder.
Everyone experiences the feeling of being shy, nervous or anxious sometimes, but social anxiety multiplies those feelings to the extreme, so much so that it can affect many aspects of your life, outside of work or school etc. Students with this disorder experience ridiculously high levels of stress as it is never mind the extra pressure that comes with presentations, projects and other group assignments. For them it can be scary even to just raise their hand to answer a question due to the fear of being judged or criticized for being wrong. Presentations are hell, sometimes you have panic attacks prior to them, or shortness of breath during them, personally, I'll stress over one project for days before so much that sometimes I'll lose my appetite, lose sleep, or let it affect my mood towards everything else until afterwards.
What I find irritates me the most about how social anxiety affects students and their schooling, is how teachers and staff approach it. Most of the time if you tell a teacher about this, they say "Oh don't worry, everyone gets nervous!" and continues to ignore your request to present sometime other than in front of the entire class. The other excuse used is that if they make special arrangements for one student, then everyone else claims they have the same problem. Honestly this seems to be a problem with no apparent solution, people will claim they have anxiety of some form or another when they really don't, and those who actually do are usually too scared or unaware to ask for help, so there's constantly the assumption of "Attention seeking" when people mention of mental illness.
Everyone experiences the feeling of being shy, nervous or anxious sometimes, but social anxiety multiplies those feelings to the extreme, so much so that it can affect many aspects of your life, outside of work or school etc. Students with this disorder experience ridiculously high levels of stress as it is never mind the extra pressure that comes with presentations, projects and other group assignments. For them it can be scary even to just raise their hand to answer a question due to the fear of being judged or criticized for being wrong. Presentations are hell, sometimes you have panic attacks prior to them, or shortness of breath during them, personally, I'll stress over one project for days before so much that sometimes I'll lose my appetite, lose sleep, or let it affect my mood towards everything else until afterwards.
What I find irritates me the most about how social anxiety affects students and their schooling, is how teachers and staff approach it. Most of the time if you tell a teacher about this, they say "Oh don't worry, everyone gets nervous!" and continues to ignore your request to present sometime other than in front of the entire class. The other excuse used is that if they make special arrangements for one student, then everyone else claims they have the same problem. Honestly this seems to be a problem with no apparent solution, people will claim they have anxiety of some form or another when they really don't, and those who actually do are usually too scared or unaware to ask for help, so there's constantly the assumption of "Attention seeking" when people mention of mental illness.