What Doctors Won’t Tell You About The Drugs For Panic Disorder

In the mental health world, there are no cures.  Mental health medicine offers only temporary relief. But you can learn to deal with things like panic attacks without using drugs.

Pill Dependency

If it often seems like there’s a pill for everything, it’s because there is. Nearly every disease and every disorder has some type of medicine marketed to it, and if you go to the doctor for any reason — even something as mild as a slight cough — chances are the doctor will prescribe you some type of medicine with the claim that it will solve the problem. Whether it works or it doesn’t is not the issue (even though many of them don’t work or have safer alternatives). What matters is that there are cures available for just about everything.

Drugs And Mental Health

In the mental health world, however, it’s not quite that simple. There are no “cures” for mental health problems. There’s no medicine you can take to stop schizophrenia forever or a pill that will permanently prevent all depression. Mental health medicine represents only a temporary relief. As long as you take the medicine, then supposedly your symptoms will go away.

The problem is that the way they go away isn’t what most people are looking for. Mental health medications:

• Change your personality.
• Cause listlessness or depression.
• Make it hard to feel feelings or sit still.

Mental health medicine changes who you are, so that while you may experience a decrease in symptoms, you’ll also experience a decrease in satisfaction and in what makes you unique. There’s a reason that natural and medicine-free treatments are preferred over these pharmaceutical medications. The pharmaceuticals don’t provide you with the relief you need.

In fact, in the case of one mental health disorder, they may actually cause you more problems than if you never took the medicine at all. That disorder is known as panic disorder.

What Makes Medicine So Problematic For Panic Disorder

Panic disorder occurs when you have regular, persistent panic attacks. Panic attacks are a physical response to mental stimuli. They occur because the mind is too focused on how the body reacts to everyday events. The mind becomes so focused that it becomes oversensitive. Panic disorders go through a cycle:

• Person suffers from panic attack.
• Person worries that they’ll have another panic attack.
• Person gets anxiety that they may get a panic attack.
• Anxiety increases the person’s heart rate.
• Person feels the heart rate increase and thinks he is having a panic attack.
• Person suffers from a panic attack.

Worrying About Panic

Indeed, the worry that you’ll get a panic attack is one of the main things that lead to panic. There’s a reason it’s such a vicious cycle.

Panic attacks can be so intense that many people go to the hospital thinking that something is physically wrong with them. While at the hospital, doctors prescribe the standard drugs for panic attacks: heavy tranquilizers and anti-anxiety medication. Both of these drastically alter your energy and your personality. You cannot take either of them for very long. But to be fair to modern medicine, they do have the ability to decrease the frequency of your panic attacks.

The problem isn’t just the side effects of the drugs. The problem is what happens when you start weaning off the drugs. People who start to get off the drugs worry that they’ll experience another panic attack again, causing hypersensitivity. In addition, the body has been under the influence of tranquilizers for so long that patients often experience more anxiety and physical disturbances than before they were on the drugs. Those two factors often mean that those with panic disorder will actually experience more frequent and intense panic attacks than before they ever took the drugs. In other words, the drugs provided temporarily relief, only to make the panic attacks worse.

Drug-Free Coping Methods

It’s tempting to want to depend on pharmaceutical medications for temporary relief, especially because panic attacks often feel so severe. But the truth is that the time you spend on the drugs will not provide you with more happiness. Once you get off them, your panic attack cycle will most likely increase, or at the very least go back to how it was before you took the drugs.

You need to learn drug-free ways to cope with your panic attacks. The best way is to stop fighting them. Recognize you have a panic attack problem and start expecting them. If you find that your panic attacks often occur in a certain area, don’t avoid that area. Go there, let yourself have a panic attack, and go about your day. The more you expect and experience a panic attack the less fearful an experience it becomes.

Herbal supplements can be quite effective as well. Some of the most common include:

• Kava:  Kava is perhaps the most well-researched and documented herbal relief supplement for anxiety. There are no side effects (provided you don’t take it with alcohol) and no addiction. It simply relieves some of your anxiety so that you can relax, ultimately reducing some of the pressure you put upon yourself to avoid anxiety symptoms. You should avoid kava if you have liver problems.
• Passionflower:  Passionflower is like kava, but is more suited for mild anxiety. Still, when it comes to panic attacks, any relief from anxiety helps. Passionflower is a good idea if you don’t trust kava’s interactions or are worried about your liver health.

Relaxation

Learning relaxation exercises, like deep breathing or progressive muscle relaxation, also helps. When you’re experiencing a panic attack, these activities may not be that helpful; but usually you can anticipate a panic attack’s approach when you start growing anxious. When this occurs, these natural relaxation exercises can be a tremendous help in heading off or blunting the attack.

Finally, find a friend to call who understands that you experience panic attacks and is willing to take your call whenever you need help. The reason for this: Panic attacks are exacerbated by the feeling that something is seriously wrong and you can’t do anything about it. If you have someone on the phone with you, you subconsciously accept that someone is available to immediately get help if something is amiss. You’ll feel calmer as a result, and the panic attacks will be less pronounced.

Still, whatever you do, try to avoid today’s pharmaceutical medicines for panic attacks. They’re simply not that beneficial, won’t provide you with the relief you need and may increase the frequency of your panic attacks in the future.