Are panic disorder and panic attacks the same thing or are they two separate conditions? In other words, does someone who suffers from panic attacks automatically get labelled as having panic disorder? The short answer to that question is no. Someone who suffers from panic attacks doesn’t necessarily have panic disorder.

First of all, throughout the world, every year, many people experience panic attacks first-hand. In a lot of cases, these attacks are isolated incidents and are usually triggered when the sufferer is experiencing extreme stress within their lives or when the person is faced with some heavy negative emotion. For example, following the death of a loved one etc.

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So what really is an anxiety or panic attack? Perhaps you don’t suffer from it yourself, but you know someone who does and you want to better understand it. If so, the preceding section probably only made sense half of the time, and you still haven’t got a clue as to what makes panic and anxiety tick.

Like many mentally harmful problems anxiety disorders aren’t easy to explain. Putting it in simple terms might seem to be trivializing it whereas using big medical words just makes it all that much harder to understand. So hoping that you won’t think I’m trivializing what can be a debilitating condition to most sufferers, myself included, I’ll try and put it in an easy to understand manner.

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