Panic on YouTube

This is from a YouTube poster KevinGetsHealthy, and features a real, live panic attack on camera. It's freaking intense. Show it to anyone in your life who believes panic can be managed by "just sucking it up."

I absolutely applaud this kid for posting this, and for believing so forcefully that people with panic are frequently not weaker but stronger people than most, for having the courage to live relatively normal, active lives despite the challenges they face in doing so.

And then there's this: "Almost hit a cop, once." Throwaway line of the week.


This is another vid from KevinGetsHealthy's YouTube channel, in which the star discusses how to prevent agoraphobia. Unfortunately, as far as I'm concerned, he's got a confused understanding of what causes agoraphobia, the chronic avoidance behaviors that can result from panic disorder. He says, "One of the big problems people have with panic attacks is looking for what causes them and falsely identifying it...This is what causes agoraphobia." He says, "People...have [a panic attack] in a car...and they go, Cars may cause my panic attacks. It's worth not driving to not have panic attacks." As though you have the power to consciously decide what triggers will cause your agoraphobic behavior.

In my experience, as in my understanding of the science behind agoraphobia, agoraphobic fears do not originate in conscious thought, but rather are an unconscious response to the places and situations that trigger them. As neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux writes:

...the brain has multiple memory systems, each devoted to different kinds of memory functions. For traumatic memory, two systems are particularly important. For example, if you return to the scene of an accident, you will be reminded of the accident and will remember where you were going, who you were with, and other details about the experience. These are explicit (conscious) memories mediated by the hippocampus and other aspects of the temporal lobe memory system. In addition, your blood pressure and heart rate may rise, you may begin to sweat, and your muscles may tighten up. These are implicit (unconscious) memories mediated by the amygdala and its neural connections. They are memories in the sense that they cause your body to respond in a particular way as a result of past experiences. The conscious memory of the past experience and the physiological responses elicited thus reflect the operation of two separate memory systems that operate in parallel.

...In fear conditioning, the subject receives a neutral stimulus in connection with some unpleasant event. As a result of its past association with the unpleasant event, the neutral stimulus acquires the capacity of elicit protective reactions in anticipation of danger. If you were bitten by your neighbor's dog yesterday, the sight of the beast today (and for some time to come) will certainly put you on guard, causing you, for example, to freeze dead in your tracks, or perhaps to run away, and will also lead to a host of physiological responses.

...Neuroanatomists have shown that the pathways that connect the emotional processing system of fear, the amygdala, with the thinking brain, the neocortex, are not symmetrical -the connections from the cortex to the amygdala are considerably weaker than those from the amygdala to the cortex. This may explain why, once an emotion is aroused, it is so hard for us to turn it off at will.

You don't get the option of deciding what locations and situations will or won't cause your agoraphobic fears. Rather, your body experiences the symptoms of fear, and then your conscious mind identifies a certain location or type of situation as having caused that sense of fear. Even the kid in this video acknowledges this, whether he realizes it or not, when he recognizes, "Going back to places where I've had panic attacks makes me nervous, physically, there's a physical reaction to them," and again when he says, "I had a few [panic attacks] while checking my email, and I had a rough time checking my email after that, which is weird." Clearly, this was a fear that arose outside his consciousness.