Panic Disorder

Check out our ADAA members' new books: Panic Disorder and Agoraphobia (Vol 55) - Advances in Psychotherapy Evidence-Based Practice, The Anxiety Busting Workbook for Kids: Fun CBT Activities to Squash Your Fears and Worries, and This is What Anxiety Looks Like: Relatable Stories, Targeted Solutions, and CBT Skills for Lasting Relief - In Conversation with ADAA Member Authors.

Panic attacks, particularly when you don’t know what they are or where they are coming from, can be incredibly frightening. ADAA member Simon Rego, PsyD, ABPP, A-CBT understands how scary it can be for someone who suffers from panic disorder. Check out this blog to learn more about panic attacks, panic disorders, and how to treat them.

It seems as though anxiety picks the worst times to torment us. But it’s important to recognize that the content of worries, panic, or OCD changes as our lives change.

Fear is one of the six basic human emotions, with a clear evolutionary purpose: to help us respond to danger and survive. In Exposure Therapy, providers create a safe environment to intentionally “expose” their clients to objects, activities, or situations they fear.

Panic isn’t what you think it is. It’s not an attack at all, and that’s a misleading name for it. It’s you having an internal reaction of fear – your heart rate changes, your muscles tense up, your stomach feels bad, you have scary thoughts of calamities, and so on.

The headlines and the CDC report are indeed alarming, but they should serve as a wakeup call to all of us. Yes, we should think seriously about why we are seeing a steep decline in the mental health of teenage girls, but we have to come together now as parents, family, friends, educators, clinicians, providers, and as a society to support, enhance and establish more preventive measures for our youth.

A Q&A with ADAA Member Karen Cassiday, PhD, ACT answering community questions on overcoming agoraphobia.