3 ms·

Forgive me, I did not clearly explain that. It does not trivialise the death of my child in any way. Having my first daughter dying was one of the worst things

• michaelochurch 15y ago
  Panic attacks are truly awful. I'm sorry to hear that you've had them, and more sorry to hear about your daughter. How long did your panic disorder last? How'd you get it into resolved? What therapies did you pursue, how long did they take, and how well did they work? I developed PD after making the idiotic decision to work (at a Wall Street job) through a flu-- not a cold, but actual influenza-- taking only 2 days off. Stupid macho trader bullshit I tried to pull at 24. So I didn't recover properly and ended up developing a respiratory infection that intermittently made breathing difficult: hence, panic attacks. At the same time, two very close friends (a little bit too deep into psychedelics) were having nervous breakdowns at the same time and even though I wasn't using, I started worrying that it might happen to me, because I was dealing with their bullshit every day. Which meant that the panic attacks became self-reinforcing; because I saw mental illness in my daily life, I thought I might develop it. Of course, that didn't happen because, even though it feels otherwise, panic disorder is not "going crazy". I think panic disorder is actually more like a much less severe cousin of epilepsy (an acute, intermittent, and highly treatable physical problem) than chronic mental illness, but that's anther rant. I don't have full-on panic attacks at this point, but I still have low-level anxiety attacks (the kind that normal people get once a decade or so, which are rough but NOT panic attacks) on a 1-2 per day frequency. It was a fascinating experience, but a deeply negative one. It doesn't help that most people think of panic attacks as the punchline to a joke. Sometimes I feel the need to say, "No, you didn't actually have a 'panic attack' when you saw Lady Gaga wear the meat-dress." This must be what people with real insomnia feel when idiots write Facebook statuses like "farmville at 2:30 am. i'm such an insomniac lol". What has actually stayed with me is the incompetence of the U.S. medical system. The experience of being neglected in a time of (perceived) exigent emergency is jarring. More scarring than the attacks themselves (during a panic attack, you don't write many memories, and this is a good thing) was how much medical incompetence and don't-give-a-shit attitude I experienced when I was sick with this "mystery" health problem (the respiratory infection and panic disorder onset happened at the same time) that turned out, thankfully, not to be that serious. I'm terrified of what it will be like in a few decades (fingers crossed) when I have to deal with real, serious health problems-- I hope the system is less broken, by then.
  • MichaelGG 15y ago
    I've have panic attacks like the OP. They lasted pretty strongly for a year, then tapered off. Treatment: Basically, lots of benzos (Xanax) that I titrated myself off of over time. (Xanax is a much lower risk drug than some of the powerful ones a psych might prescribe (SSRIs, for example)). For years though, I couldn't do anything that put me in an altered state. Even taking Benadryl to sleep (which makes you groggy at first), would make me freak out. Even a tiny hit of pot would make me get all scared. Apart from taking Xanax on-demand, it just mostly went away... I still keep Xanax in my pocket (I think everyone should, to be able to remain clear headed if a panic situation arises), but hardly ever need them.
    • michaelochurch 15y ago
      I'm on very low doses of Klonopin, which takes longer (about 30 minutes) to set in but I think that was a very good thing. First, there's no sudden change in psychological state. Sudden relaxation during panic could have a paradoxical effect. Second, it puts a 30-60 minute upper bound on the attack but still requires me to work at calming myself down. If it took effect immediately, I never would have had to go through the hard process of deliberately calming myself down, through which I learned a lot of skills that work on run-of-the-mill negative emotions as well as on panic. Thanks to that process, I'm probably actually above average in mental health post-panic. Panic disorder teaches in a very visceral way that most of the garden-variety worries are just not worth getting upset over.
    • Vivtek 15y ago
      When my wife was being treated for PD, she tried Xanax and hated it. She said it felt as though she was still having a panic attack but just couldn't act on it - which, for her, was even scarier. People's minds are weird things.
      • michaelochurch 15y ago
        That's the paradoxical effect. It happens, sadly, with most psychiatric medicines. No one really knows why, but a small percentage of people end up getting worse. That could have been at play with your wife. Or it could have been a nocebo (negative placebo) effect, or just the course of the attack. For example, the worst panic attacks tend to come on suddenly with a defined liminal point (not an upward creep of anxiety throughout the day) and peak 3-7 minutes afterward. If she took the Xanax at the liminal point and felt worse 5 minutes later, that's not because of the drug, but the panic attack's initial upward swing. The truth is that benzodiazepines don't really abort a panic attack-- at least not in the short (<5 minutes) term. Nothing really can. What benzos are great for is recovering from a panic attack and preventing it from rolling into another one. If your wife felt shitty for 5 minutes, but great at T=30 minutes, then it's not the drug's fault because the drug worked. SSRIs also have a paradoxical effect. I think SSRIs are somewhat like a less risky version of electroconvulsive therapy: they induce a change of state in the brain, and the brain's response gets it out of a depressive cycle, but it's not clear why one state change ("shock") works and another doesn't. To make it weirder, when people are on SSRIs for a while there's a tendency for the drug to stop working ("poop out"). No surprise: this sounds like tolerance. However, at this point both raising and lowering the doses can work. So it seems like any change in this state variable is what can cause the improvement, but no one really knows. (That said, never hard taper on an SSRI, and definitely don't reduce dosage without talking to a doctor.)