2006 Panic Conference, initial review

Hi Folks,

I'm somewhat exhausted at the moment, so this
initial description of the 2006 Panic Conference
will be very brief. I will elaborate on details
later. And, in time, the proceedings will be made
freely available to everyone, as we have always
done.

The conference was disappointingly small this
year. However, this year's presentations were
among the best of this conference's history.

For a number of reasons, we had a lot of last
minute cancellations and had to scale back
the usually two-day conference to a one-day
event. Further practical issues compelled us
to abandon the usual coffee breaks and lunch
break, so all of the presentations ran
consecutively, without formal breaks. This
amounted to a rather intense academic
experience.

J. Sakyiama presented "Panic Disorder: How Much
Do We Know?" Using a survey, he had conducted
a study of perceptions of panic attacks amongst
university students. Specifically, he compared
perceptions of students majoring in psychology,
biochemistry and computer science. He further
compared these perceptions against literature
on panic attacks. Discipline differences were
sometimes as expected, sometimes not. Overall,
most had reasonable ideas of panic symptoms,
yet panic was mostly viewed as "psychological"
in nature, with little acknowledgement of
medical or neurological aspects.

Q. Wu presented "Panic Attacks in Children from
Scary Advertisements On Television." Her study
showed good evidence that frightening TV ads
could traumatize unsupervised children. She then
described practices that parents could employ to
reduce such effects; parental supervision and
comfort, distraction techniques, etc.

D. Sinclair presented "Stopping a Panic Attack
by Decreasing the Carbon Dioxide in Inhaled Air."
His study wasn't simply a rehash of CO2 based
"suffocation alarm" theory. He described two
different CO2 alarm systems (one involving
receptors in the Aorta and another involving
receptors in the Medulla, how they interacted
and how they explained apparently paradoxical
reactions to CO2 relating to panic attacks).

R. Duda presented "Panic Attacks in Soldiers
in Combat Situations." As a military psychiatrist
treating soldiers in current war zones, his talk
was an excellent description of modern military
psychiatry; including case studies and personal
anecdotes. Naturally, anxiety disorders are
expected in combat situations and often suggest
lessons for civilian anxiety disorders.

Following our formal presentations, I was asked
to speak some concluding remarks. Such remarks
are supposed to be brief and I was only given
a few days prior to prepare. For guidance,
I asked the thoughts of my fellow patients in
the groups ASAP and ASAP-M. My fellow patients
asked me to express the severity of panic attacks,
and comment on medications.

My concluding remarks addressed that the most
common beliefs of panic attacks were often based
on mild to moderate cases. The popular beliefs
that panic attacks were "frightening, but not
dangerous" and that panic attacks were "highly
treatable" I acknowledged as true for most
cases, yet took serious issue with regarding
severe or chronic cases. I did explain that
severe panic attacks were much like long-lasting
conscious seizures. I also noted that many recent
studies indicated that prolonged job stress
(blue-collar, white-collar or otherwise) have
been associated with ill health, so why should
the stress of prolonged and frequent panic
attacks be any different? Well, that's the
short and simple version of what I said.

The conference, proper, ended about mid-afternoon.
Some people left. Those of us who stayed quickly
gathered to embrace discussions that waxed and
waned from technical to friendly. We were also
hungry, so we ordered some pizzas and the like
delivered to the conference suites (a new and
amusing first for the conference's four year
history). We enjoyed each other's company for
a few hours more. Eventually, however, we had
to end the day, knowing that most of us had to
return to distant countries. Such good-byes are
always bittersweet.

Overall, the conference was strangely successful.
Despite misfortune and low attendance, we had
great presenters and great material to add to
our proceedings. And, after all, our greatest
audience is the readers of the proceedings.

Somehow, our twisted altruistic notions had
apparently panned out one more time.

Best Wishes,
Arthur