First of all, I’m sorry for my English. I am an Italian psychiatrist, and my English is OK but not the best. I am a man in my thirties and I work for “Disfunzionalità neurotrasmittive” at the “Policlinico di Torvergata”, which is a university/hospital in Rome.
We mostly focus on neurotransmitter imbalances, which usually occur when the body is under the increased stress and anxiety that accompany a panic attack. Gaba, norepinephrine, and glutamate studies and how they affect the body during a PA are what we are working on right now.
You should not read more if you suffer from PA often.
Back in July 2017, we began a study on how the glutamate during a PA can influence your brain, and we thought that it could be the reason why some strong PAs produce hallucinations in the patients. So my group started to dig a rabbit hole in the confusing and huge scientific literature on this topic, and we did find something frightful.
At first we were shocked that something so dumb was published in a respected psychiatric journal, but then we found more and more literature on that topic and we started to do our own research.
From 2019 to 2021, I had the most difficult time of my life, knowing that something that we discovered is widely known in the environment but is kept secret for a reason.
PAs can actually kill you, and they do that in the most frightful way.
Because everything is related to the suggestion, the majority of the victims have been in the scientific environment.
Some people, as I already told you, experience hallucinations during a panic attack. This is a progressive disorder. During a PA, there is a shift in the blood PH that causes compensatory metabolic acidosis and activates a chemosensing mechanism that translates this PH shift into an automatic respiratory response. This leads to an adrenaline rush which causes vasoconstriction that leads to less blood to the brain and, of course, less oxygen and blood sugar. The more severe the PA, the more the levels of blood sugar and oxygen in the brain drop, and when they drop sufficiently (usually in people experiencing severe panic), hallucinations occur.
And here it comes, the creepy thing:
Studies have found that during these severe panic attacks, patients usually hallucinate the same thing.
Everything begins with a shadow on the periferical vision, something you can’t really see but that gives you a very unconfortable sensation, often referred to as “being spied on by someone you can’t see”.
This sensation, of course, is not very useful in fighting with PA. In fact, people that start to experience this usually begin to have harsher panic attacks because the fear increases the panic and fights the self-control mechanism.
The successive steps are usually that this presence is felt around you. You still can’t see it, but patients begin to describe it as if it wants to reach you, to touch you, while your brain is screaming that this must never happen.
Then people that experience such strong PA usually remain on their bed but, according to the data, they feel like they can’t hide and even if they have a bed below their back, they still feel like something is behind them and is coming for them.
Last, and there is very poor literature on that, there are a few “survivors” who have been almost touched by this shadow. Others at this point experience such a strong panic that is fatal and usually translates into a HF.
The reason why this is not well known is because there is a clear relationship between knowing that and starting to experience that during PA.
But there is also a link between talking about that and to stop experiencing that, so please forgive me.