Searching the American Journal of Psychiatry website results in more than twenty-five thousand articles that speak to panic disorder and panic attacks. That statistic says a lot about the prevalence of this disorder and how widely it is studied. In 1997, a Panic Disorder Severity Scale (PDSS) was developed by M. Katherine Shear, M.D., of the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and can be administered by a clinician in five to ten minutes. The scale measures seven different factors: panic frequency; distress during panic; panic-focused anticipatory anxiety; phobic avoidance of situations; phobic avoidance of physical sensations; impairment in work functioning; and impairment in social functioning, and in the medical community, the PDSS is widely used as the first step to determine how to obtain panic attack relief for individual patients.
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People who have experienced, and continue to experience panic attacks, will recognize many of these factors as having a negative impact on their lives. These people may or may not have undergone assessment by the PDSS, but that doesn’t make them any less prone to the symptoms of panic attacks, and the constant fear that they will suffer another attack. This article will focus on how to stop panic attacks based on psychiatric and psychological treatment.
Understanding Panic Attacks
Before we can discuss how to stop panic attacks, we must first look at what they are, what causes them, and why medical professionals believe they happen. A panic attack is an intensely frightening experience that is the nucleus of panic disorder. A person suffering a panic attack can experience any or all of the following symptoms: choking or smothering sensations; fear of losing control, dying, or “going crazy”; feeling unsteady; feelings of nearly paralyzing terror; nausea or stomach pains; numbness or tingling in fingers or toes; shortness of breath; and sweating. It is easy, then, to see why many people present themselves to the emergency department believing they are suffering a heart attack, completely unaware that they are actually experiencing a panic attack.
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Panic attacks generally happen the first time when a person is between the ages of 25 and 30 years old. Unfortunately, the first attack may be mistaken for something else, but has really been triggered by a life-altering event such as divorce, the death of a loved one, or even an impending marriage or the birth of a child. Many patients do not correlate their first attack to the actual trigger, making it very difficult to determine what started their attacks, and delaying diagnosis and treatment for far too long.
Patients may believe they recognize their triggers and begin to try to avoid them, which can lead to other serious issues, such as agoraphobia and other phobia-type illnesses. Without proper treatment, the cycle becomes a slippery slope, growing worse and worse over time. Fortunately, once identified, panic disorder is treatable, and a good percentage (around 90%) of panic attack sufferers go on to lead healthy, attack-free lives.
