Panic attacks...

One of the themes today, on Radio 5 Live’s breakfast show, was panic attacks: something that’s been part of my life since the age of twenty. The first time I had a panic attack I thought I was dying. It was so violent, so unexpected; I had no experience to compare it with. The symptoms that would become familiar in subsequent attacks were all new to me, all devastating and all happening simultaneously. My heart beat like hammer blows against my chest; if this was a heart attack I surely wouldn’t survive it. At the same time I was overtaken by a feeling of dread... not about the prospect of dying, but of going mad. If the hammering of my heart seemed impossible to survive physically, then these overwhelming feelings seemed impossible to survive mentally. Everything felt unreal; there was a roaring in my head; I was overwhelmed by a tidal wave of dread. Something terrible was happening to me, and it was going to get worse; I just didn’t know what it was.

My heart didn’t burst. My brain didn’t burst either. After a few minutes - time had lost all meaning - the worst was over. I felt weak, clammy, exhausted, bewildered, disorientated... but whatever it was had abated. The tide had gone out. The only thing I knew for sure was that I never wanted to go through anything like that again.

I’m not sure how long it was until I had my next attack. I didn’t keep a diary. Perhaps I was hoping the experience was a one-off visitation. It wasn’t. The second time was as bad as the first: sudden, unanticipated, violent, terrifying. There were many more attacks, often accompanied by other symptoms too, which, though not as frightening, created an experience that left me drained: sweating, difficulty in breathing, pins and needles - or numbness - in hands and feet, hot and cold flushes, the ‘shakes’, feeling faint and dizzy… and always feeling unreal. For years, in between panic attacks, there was a pervasive sense of unattributable anxiety. 

A panic attack isn’t something that happens to you. It is you: a sudden and terrifying apprehension that nothing is right and everything is wrong. The major and minor manifestations - physical and mental - were not symptoms that I could look at with any kind of detachment or objectivity. One moment I was ‘me’ - whatever that was - and a moment later I was something entirely different. Wherever I was, I had to be somewhere else. If I was out, I had to get home; if I was home, I had to get out. There was no place of safety. I wanted to escape, but how can you escape from your own self?

Though every panic attack was terrifying, I eventually understood that they weren’t a threat to life. I learned a few ways to anticipate and deal with them, and I’m happy to say that I haven’t had a full-blown panic attack for about ten years…