Hi, I'm new here, my name is Adrian. I am a perfectly healthy 17 year old all except for one thing. Yes, you guessed it. I have been having panic attacks since I was 13 but was only diagnosed recently. My first spout of "Anxiety" came when I was asked to read out loud in school. I was suprised at this, because it's something I'v always enjoyed doing. I know now that this probably came about because of the pressure that was on me: I had just moved to a private school and 2 and a half hours of homework a night was the usual occurence. These attacks were on and off throughout the years, usually in the same situation. This led me to all kinds of trouble with skipping school to avoid those situations. However, I managed to scrape through and finish my GCSEs with some very good grades, however many were nowhere near as good as they should have been (subjects like german which involved lots of public speaking). I went to the 6th form but only lasted half a term. My father died while I was halfway through the 2 year GCSE course and after really giving it everything I had to finish the course, I decided I simply couldn't go straight into another year. This was when the serious depression kicked in. I wasn't posistive about anything whatsoever. I got a small part time cleaning job at night with minimal contact with other people and began drinking rather heavily (6 cans of the 5% stuff a night, every night, is pretty extreme for someone my age) and began having regular "full-blown" panic attacks every other day. At first I had no idea what they were, and so ended up in the hospital emergency room quite often thinking I was dying. After being diagnosed I felt so much better because I knew what they were, but terrible because I knew they couldn't be stopped straight away. I really started to hate and fear myself, because when I had a panic attack all I could think about was trying to die, I put the blame for this partially on my docter for not explaining everything clearly, almost dismissing it as trivial. It's only recently after discovering this site I realize that this is prefectly normal, and IS NOT a permanent thing. I feel that if I hadn't have found this site I wouldn't have lasted much longer, I even began to think I was schizophrenic!! I was feeling very, very anxious when I found the site and after reading the self-help, I immedietly felt better. I'm so sorry for the length of this post, but you can imadgine my uttermost relief. I am not going crazy and my heart is perfectly healthy (I even had an ECG scan because I was convinced it was going to fail me) and now I can control them. My depression is also clearing up with the help of my medication and I'm looking forward to going back to school in september (well, as much as anybody can look forward to school lol). So, thankyou to all concerned and thankyou for reading this, I just had to tell someone how relieved I am after 5 years of thinking I was nuts
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