Panic attacks are truly terrifying

ALL CReDIT to nadiya Hussain, star of The Great British Bake Off, who has spoken candidly about having panic attacks. nadiya, who is now co- hosting BBC2’s The Big Family Cooking Showdown, has revealed that she’s dogged by panic attacks, which she described as her ‘monster’.

Panic attacks are one of those mental health problems that are greatly misunderstood, and unless you have had them yourself, it’s hard to appreciate how crippling they can be.

I think partly it’s because the word ‘panic’ makes people think of getting into a bit of a state — just working yourself up. But this is not what a panic attack is like at all.

The physical symptoms are caused by your body going into ‘fight or flight’ mode. As it tries to get more oxygen, your breathing increases and your heart starts racing — and this, in turn, causes you to panic more, making the symptoms worse.

It’s a vicious cycle. You genuinely feel as if you’re about to die.

I know this because I used to have them myself. When I was at university I developed a bad chest infection, and one of the side-effects of my antibiotics was extreme lightheadedness.

One day, walking to a lecture, my head began spinning. My heart was beating faster than usual, until it was racing so hard I thought my chest would burst. I couldn’t breathe and was shaking. I sank to the floor and people crowded round, but within about ten minutes it had passed.

The next day as I walked towards the lecture theatre, I began to worry that it might happen again. And as I worried about it, it did. This went on for several weeks and I began to dread leaving the house.

But my GP said I was fine. I wasn’t, and eventually one of the physiology professors spotted one of my attacks, explained what it was and said that I should have psychotherapy.

I had six sessions of cognitive behavioural therapy and I’ve never had another attack. But I’ll never forget how terrifying and debilitating it all was. I’m proof that people get better — with the right treatment. THe day is fast approaching when even the tiniest scratch will be fatal. That was the view from the World Health Organisation this week, with a report warning there aren’t nearly enough new antibiotics in the pipeline to avert a crisis of widespread drug resistance. Through sheer stupidity, mankind has managed to make one of the most powerful discoveries in the history of our existence pitifully impotent. Some have blamed GPs, others the farmers or the pharmaceutical industry. But the truth is, we are all to blame. We insist on being prescribed antibiotics because we don’t want the inconvenience of even the mildest infection, and yet at the first sign of improvement we stop taking them. We even insist on antibiotics when we have viral infections. Our greed for cheap meat has fuelled the rise in antibiotic resistance, and yet we baulk at the idea of reducing our consumption. How many people will have to die before we change our own behaviour?