Panic vs. Anxiety

Adored Wife had a panic attack the other day.

"Quick," I asked her.  "Tell me what it was like!  I need blogging material!"

She just glared at me.

So, okay, no help there from AW.  But she has distinguished anxiety attacks from panic attacks for me before; she deals with both.  The main difference appears to be severity.  In her own words, in an anxiety attack, you think someone with a knife may be somewhere around and you're unable to focus on anything else.  In a panic attack you think someone with a knife is right behind you and you're absolutely shut down.

Medical science doesn't really differentiate the two.  Well, not as far as I know--I'm a layman and have to be careful claiming expertise that I don't have.  But I'm prepared to credit AW's personal experience that they're a little different.  The knife was just for illustrative purposes--anxiety is a feeling of general worry and fretting, panic is a sense of immediate, focused, impending doom.

There's more to it than just a difference in degree, but Adored Wife finds it hard to put into words.  The two have a difference in feel or flavor, or texture, or something.  It brings up one of the great difficulties in understanding any kind of neurological or psychological or emotional maladjustment--language is limited.  For instance, I can try to tell you that when I'm "depressed," it's not like ordinary sadness or grouchiness or pessimism but is more like a gray filter that seems to cloud all my experience, but that doesn't really convey the sensation.

This is why poetry is useful--properly used words can evoke the mood and feel of anxiety or depression or panic or hysteria without getting bogged down in limited and misleading attempts at description.  Unfortunately, AW also deals with anomic aphasia, the inability to come up with the right words, so telling me what panic attacks are actually LIKE for her is probably doomed to failure.

But we keep trying.  I have blog space to fill.

Hope all's well out there, friends, and God bless.