Panic Attack Treatment

Panic attacks can be devastating. Causing the victim to suddenly feel like they are even having a heart attack, or a nervous breakdown, they can totally immobilize an individual. Though many people have taken powerful medications to try to prevent these, Cognitive Therapy has been found to be the most effective long term treatment for panic attacks and panic disorder.

To Understand Panic Attack Treatment, Understand the Cause

Panic attacks are actually a creation of the victim’s own thought process. A panic attack is truly not anything greater than a series of anxiety sensations that are horribly misinterpreted by the senses as actually hazardous. The victim believes and feels like he or she is actually in danger, and this leads to greater levels of anxiety. These anxious feelings then steer the person towards even more feelings of fear, leading to additionally traumatic thoughts. Finally a vicious cycle is created connecting sensations of the body, thoughts that are distorted, and anxiety. This is rapidly able to lead to a panic attack. Ultimately, the actual dilemma is that the person falsely believes that he or she is in real peril, and not in fact the panic. Panic itself is really the right emotional response to conviction that one is actually in trouble.

Brief History of Cognitive Therapy

The first experiments conducted in cognitive behavioral therapy were done by Pavlov, Skinner, Eysenck, and Watson, to name some of them. They began the process of using behavior treatments to help those with mental disorders. These behavioral modifications proved to be a means of changing a person’s behaviors and reactions to different stimulus. They utilized punishment and positive and negative reinforcement. The limitations with this early ancestor of cognitive therapy lay in its only concentrating on behavior that could be literally observed, rather than exploring the thought processes of a person.

Finally by the 1960′s and 1970′s, other thinkers started to contemplate the place that cognition should occupy in the treating of psychiatric disorders. Albert Ellis came up with his REBT, or Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. This suggested that a person’s evaluation of an event, and not the actual event itself, led to emotional distress for the individual. Aaron Beck created his Cognitive Therapy around the same time. His theory postulated that the ways a person perceives the world, developed from assumptions and attitudes learned in earlier experience, led to a person’s behavior. It was the actual merging of these two techniques for therapy into one seamless approach that created Cognitive Therapy Behavior as it is known today.

Where anxiety disorders, such as panic attacks, are concerned, this cognitive behavior therapy has proven itself in a wide range of studies to be the most effective and best method of treating patients suffering from such anxiety disorders. Especially where panic attacks are involved, this treatment is supremely effective. Somewhere between fully eighty and eighty-five percent of victims of panic disorders are able to attain a panic free status, and typically within eight sessions or even fewer.

The reason that such cognitive behavior therapy proves to be so supremely effective for treating panic disorder lies in the structure of the treatment. Cognitive behavior therapy is actually comprised of two distinct parts. The first of these is the identifying and altering of the thinking pattern that has become distorted. Such thinking patterns are commonly affected by the stresses of the modern day world. Cognitive therapy in its classical sense deals with this part of the problem. The second part lies in managing to desensitize a person’s resulting anxiety by exposing the person to the situations that cause their fear in the first place. This is where the old behavior therapy component of the treatment comes into play.

How much of each component in cognitive therapy treatment is actually utilized and emphasized comes down to the particular nature and scope of the person’s problem. As a good example, where the problems are phobias, such as the fear of heights, these can be efficiently and capably remedied using exposure therapy by itself. Panic disorder that is not connected to agoraphobia, of fear of wide open spaces, is most successfully remedied through only cognitive therapy by itself. When the individual victim of the panic attacks also suffers from a good quantity of agoraphobia along with the ensuing panic attacks, then many times both strains of the cognitive behavior therapy will have to be included in the treatments. This is because the person will have to overcome first his or her mis-perceptions in thinking patterns, and then the situation that he or she actually fears itself.