Retroactive diagnosis
I've just read Robin Dalton's 1965 autobiography, Aunts Up The Cross, in which she describes one of her father's patients, "one of his regular and more boring hypochondriacs", whom he treated by making "reassuring noises":
"'I get these terrifying palpitations, Doctor - sometimes when I lie down I think I'm going to choke. And then, suddenly, I'll get a feeling of something awful about to happen - it's my nerves, I suppose. Don't you think I should have something to calm my nerves?'"
Those are unmistakeably the miserable, debilitating symptoms of a panic attack. She was right; it was her nerves. It took ten years for my Panic Anxiety Disorder to be diagnosed and treated; I suppose hers never was, except with "an occasional murmur of sympathy". (I can't be too harsh on Dalton's doctor father, however; in five years my first shrink never noticed that I had depression.)
"'I get these terrifying palpitations, Doctor - sometimes when I lie down I think I'm going to choke. And then, suddenly, I'll get a feeling of something awful about to happen - it's my nerves, I suppose. Don't you think I should have something to calm my nerves?'"
Those are unmistakeably the miserable, debilitating symptoms of a panic attack. She was right; it was her nerves. It took ten years for my Panic Anxiety Disorder to be diagnosed and treated; I suppose hers never was, except with "an occasional murmur of sympathy". (I can't be too harsh on Dalton's doctor father, however; in five years my first shrink never noticed that I had depression.)