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What is it — “Panic attacks”?

Helen
3 min readAug 8, 2024

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Let me remind you that many already know: “Sympatho-adrenal” crises (panic attacks) are uncontrollable, irrational, exhausting and very intense attacks of panic and anxiety, which are accompanied by somatic and psychological manifestations.

Such conditions can affect a person’s cognitive abilities and behavior .

These conditions are very common, about 10% of cases and, most importantly, they affect young working people from 19 to 45 years old, and women suffer from this disease 2 times more than men.

There are three main types of panic attacks, namely:

  1. “Spontaneous panic attack”: it has a very unfavorable form of the course of this disease, when a person cannot determine the clear initial factor when the attack occurs and does not have time to prepare for it.

2. A “situational” panic attack has psycho-somatic “roots” and appears in a specific “psychotraumatic situation” or on its threshold.

For example: preparing for exams, before a public speaking, discord with someone close, after conflicts, all sorts of things, stuffy rooms or maybe alien environments.

  • “Conditional situational attack”: in this case, chemical or biological triggers are added to the psychological one. For example: coffee, tea, alcoholic drinks, changes in hormonal levels…

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Helen
Helen

Written by Helen

I’m a board member for the Harvard Creative Writing Collective and an outreach associate director for Harvard Women in Computer Science.

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