Sorry for the short post - my keyboard locked up (must have had a panic attack). Anyway, the DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - there's a mouthful, huh?) is the official book used by physicians and mental health professionals (pretty much around the world) to treat and diagnose mental disorders. And there's a big fat section in it on anxiety disorders. In The Panic Diaries, we talk about most of the biggies - 11 in all, ranging from agoraphobia to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Each of these is category of an anxiety disorder and all anxiety disorders can have panic attacks as one of their primary symptoms. As Jeanne mentioned in her post, it wasn't until 1980 (when a revised edition of the DSM appeared) that anxiety disorders got their own little (?) section. Prior to that time, the odds of a doctor being able to diagnose and treat (not to mention "understand") your specific anxiety condition were pretty darn low. As we know nowadays, the symptoms of say, agoraphobia are vastly different from OCD or PTSD. But none of these distinctions were made before 1980. The good news in all of this is that doctors and mental health professionals have a much better understanding of these disorders than they did just a few decades ago. That means better results and treatments for you, me, Jeanne and the approximately 200 million other people around the world (low estimate, actually) who struggle with anxiety disorders! As we say in the book "if you happen to suffer from one of these disorders, you couldn't have picked a better time to be born!"
-Julie