Panic Disorder

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20, 2006 Progress in treating ba href=/panic disorder/a/b By JESSIE MILLIGAN Fort Worth Star-Telegram She was anxious.

Her heart rate increased.

That frightened her, and the more scared she became, the more her heart raced.

Before long, she was running down the dark alleys of her own fears.

That's what it feels like inside the jagged edges of what we now know to be panic attacks, says Clark Vinson, the therapist who eventually treated the Texas woman at the Arlington-based Phobia Center of Dallas/Fort Worth.

But back then, 20 years ago, panic attacks weren't so well understood.

The woman went through 64 electroshock treatments, and then sought Vinson's help.

''What we needed to do was treat her reaction to her own fear,'' Vinson says.

Doctors, therapists and the public have made great leaps in the understanding of panic attacks in ...

...ba href=/panic disorder/a/b from their father.

In the world of behavioral therapists, however, panic attacks begin and end not with brain chemicals but with thoughts and actions.

Therapists say particular types of people are most prone to panic attacks.

Perfectionists and overachievers are more likely to have anxiety overflow.

No matter what causes panic attacks, doctors and therapists agree that the real trouble starts after the first panic attack.

Singer Carly Simon once confessed not only to panic attacks but also to a secondary and just as crippling fear, the fear of more panic attacks.

A fear of an attack returning can cause the development of other phobias, such as performance anxiety, claustrophobia or the fear of the outdoors.

"I've talked to people who won't go to the dentist or go get their hair cut because they don't want to have a panic attack in a place where they cannot easily flee," says Margaret Summy, a Fort Worth therapist.

Often, those people assume their fear is of the dentist or of the hairstylist.

"That's not it," Summy says.

"After the first attack, they start analyzing it and say, 'I'm not going to do that again.' " One West Texas woman whom Vinson treated had refused to leave her house without her husband for 11 years, so fearful was she that another panic attack would occur.

She told Vinson that one day she left the house by herself and tried to spark another panic attack.

"You can't have one when you want to," he told her.

"You have to fear it or it won't appear...

... Mirror.co.uk - News - EXCLUSIVE: 'I QUIT CORRIE ON THE FLIP OF A COIN' Search The Web Mirror.co.uk Images Audio Video for The Best Results from Google, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo!

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Home More 20 March 2006 EXCLUSIVE: 'I QUIT CORRIE ON THE FLIP OF A COIN' EXCLUSIVE JOHNNY BRIGGS My StoryBy Claire DonnellyIT WAS the toughest decision Johnny Briggs had ever had to make.

After 30 years playing Coronation Street's Mike Baldwin, the 70-year-old actor was thinking about calling it quits.And today he reveals for the first time how he made his monumental decision - on the flip of a coin.Johnny tossed a lucky solid silver dollar he carries with him to decide whether or not to stay.

And when the coin fell heads up he told scriptwriters to kill his character off.Speaking to the Daily Mirror on the first day of our exclusive serialisation of his revelations about life on Britain's most famous street, he says: "Believe it or not, I spun this coin to find out whether I was going or staying."I was sitting there and I thought: 'Heads I'm going, tails, I stay.' I threw it and it was heads, so that was that." Given the coin as a present by a family friend 10 years ago, he calls it his lucky charm."It was made in 1935, the year I was born, " he explains.

"I always use it to help me make decisions.

It's always in my pocket - I panic if I don't have it ...