My name is David Russ. I am a licensed psychologist in Charlotte, NC. Most clinicians are trained and work with a lot of patients with anxiety. But I have a much more personal reason such that treating anxiety has become a deep passion for me. At age 10 my daughter first showed symptoms of panic. I didn’t know it at the time but she was at the start of developing emetophobia and consequently, panic disorder. I thought, “Oh lucky you, turns out your dad is a psychologist”. Have you heard the expression, humble pie? Let’s just say I ate a lot of it.

Anyway, I pulled out all my psychologist know how, and it was all appallingly ineffective. By the way, it wasn’t because my daughter was a hard case, it was because I didn’t know some very crucial things about anxiety and its treatment. I remember smacking my hand on a chair arm and thinking, “There has to be a way to treat this and I am going to figure it out.”

I am happy to report that there is a way to fight back. By the way, I have borrowed all the science from amazing researchers and clinicians. I will try to give credit when I can. That being said, I often don’t remember who, when or where I learned something. Just know that I swiped all the good stuff.

Some really cool stuff happened along the way. One my daughter is better. I also mostly know what I am doing. Not always, of course. A colleague and I realized there was a lot of stuff for adults with anxiety but not so much for kids. What was there was mostly directed to parents. Makes sense, right? What kid is going to read a clinical self-help book and follow through with it? (Okay, maybe your kid but not most kids.) So we had one of those moments. Whatever you might believe, I am telling you it was from God. We thought of a way to convey the right information (crucial for anxiety) in a kid-friendly fashion. We wrote and produced an audio series that is really effective. It is called Turnaround. More about that later.

After Turnaround was released, we would occasionally get calls from parents saying it helped but they needed something more. It was virtually always the same issue. Want to take a guess? Emetophobia. So then we decided to do a supplement to Turnaround that helps with this particular phobia. It wasn’t quite the same. It was directed to parents or clinicians.

As technology has changed, I started messing around with the idea of an interactive book. This Apple version is as close as I have gotten although you need an Apple device to read it. In a perfect world I would have built an app. Maybe I will someday. In the meantime, I wrote a book for kids that they could interact with about emetophobia. Like Turnaround I wanted something directed to kids that a parent could oversee but that the parent wouldn’t have to become the clinician. Also, my daughter did most of the illustrations. I mean, talk about a really cool silver lining!

I will link and refer to resources that I think could be valuable and useful on this site. However, to provide full disclosure, I derive income from Turnaround, the supplement, and the Apple and Kindle children’s book.