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If anxiety and panic attacks arise as a result of a chemical imbalance, what causes that chemical imbalance to occur in the first place? Its a chicken and egg question.
Does the arising chemical imbalance cause the unfortunate psychological and behavioral symptoms or is it the other way round?
Or is this debate necessary at all?
Is it correct to look at a human being as a set of organs which can be treated without reference to the person’s experiences or personality and does this in fact work? Or is the human being far more complex and the activities of the mind influence the workings of the body?**
Supposing you are in the garden working happily, humming to yourself when suddenly you drop your heavy hammer on your bare toe. Not only will you feel strong physical symptoms but it is likely your mood will change instantly!!
Or, you are happily sitting in your garden relaxing when the telephone rings and you find out that someone you love dearly has just died violently in a car crash. Immediately your mood changes and so drastically that you could start to tremble, your appetite disappears, you may feel nausea or faint when you think about the actual crash.
We all know that our bodies and minds are connected because we have all experienced it. Basically this is the view of the mind/body lobby which says that the mind and the body are connected and that it is wrong to treat one without the other whereas other opinions suggest that if you just deal with one side of the equation the other will heal itself.
Given the two examples above we also know that to be true. When the pain from the damaged toe subsides, the person starts to feel better, more relaxed and normal.
The person who received the bad news may need a sedative to begin with to calm the physical symptoms, but over time as the bad news is absorbed and dealt with mentally, the shock subsides, the physical symptoms go away and life begins to get back to normal.
So where does this take us with anxiety and panic attacks? The problem here seems to be that there is no “return to normal”. The panic attacks are so invasive that the sufferer begins to dread the next one and gradually changes his/her life so that if a panic attack occurs it is in a place they deem as safe (usually at home). For the person with anxiety, the feelings of anxiety are never far away even if the person does feel better sometimes.
The results of these conditions is that the quality of life is affected sometimes very seriously. Anxiety and panic attacks can literally take over someone’s life.
The mind/body connection lobby looks to support the person with medication when necessary, whilst addressing possible underlying causes.
Today certain professionals in both orthodox and complementary medicine do tackle anxiety and panic attacks from both a physical and a psychological perspective.
So to summarise you have three broad views on anxiety and panic attacks. One that it is a purely physical problem and if you can control the brain mechanisms the patient will gain relief and possibly a cure will take place. The second that it is a purely mental problem, drugs are not advised and the patient needs to confront certain psychological issues and resolve them. And the third view that it might involve both and that perhaps medication should be a short term answer to relieve symptoms while the psychological side of things is being addressed.
At the beginning of this post I asked whether this debate was necessary at all. In the conclusion to this conversation, I will look at this again.
**This is really the basis of the Mind/Body Connection lobby. It appears that 2300 years ago the same debate was going on. Could you treat the body without understanding the person.
QUOTE: “The cure of the part should not be attempted without treatment of the whole. No attempt should be made to cure the body without the soul. Let no one persuade you to cure the head until he has first given you his soul to be cured, for this is the great error of our day, that physicians first separate the soul from the body.” PLATO
