Panic

Why is it important to consider comorbid
panic disorder in schizophrenia?
After all, schizophrenia wreaks such
devastation on patients' lives that panic disorder
would seem trivial in comparison. However, clinical
experience and a growing literature suggest
that comorbid panic disorder may be a major
determinant of distress and dysfunction across
many psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia.

The recognition of panic disorder in
patients with schizophrenia is crucial for designing
effective treatment. In addition, panic disorder
may play a significant pathogenetic role in
some schizophrenic illness.

During the past 30 years, the diagnosis of psychotic
disorders has become increasingly precise.
Symptoms that were once lumped together under
one diagnosis are now accurately distinguished
from one another, with disorders such as psychotic
mania, delusional depression, and paranoid
delusional disorder being properly differentiated.
These more specific diagnoses came into common
use as psychiatry better understood their symptom
clusters, natural history, and treatment
response. For example, the discovery of lithium
made the distinction between psychotic mania and
schizophrenia far more clinically pressing.

As a result of recent interest in psychiatric
comorbidity, illnesses once thought to be distinct
from one another, such as obsessive-compulsive
disorder and schizophrenia, are now known to
have important areas of overlap. Some clinicians
use the term "schizo-obsessive disorder" to
describe this condition. Similarly, social phobia
has been suggested as an etiologic factor for
schizophrenia. This article considers the treatment
of comorbid panic disorder and schizophrenia
and, in light of these new perspectives, the
possibility of a distinct "panic psychosis."

To describe the psychometric properties of the Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia for School-Age Children-Present and Lifetime version (K-SADS-PL) interview, which surveys additional disorders not assessed in prior K-SADS, contains improved probes and anchor points, includes diagnosis-specific impairment ratings, generates DSM-III-R and DSM-IV diagnoses, and divides symptoms surveyed into a screening interview and five diagnostic supplements.Subjects were 55 psychiatric outpatients and 11 normal controls (aged 7 through 17 years). Both parents and children were used as informants. Concurrent validity of the screen criteria and the K-SADS-PL diagnoses was assessed against standard self-report scales. Interrater (n = 15) and test-retest (n = 20) reliability data were also collected (mean retest interval: 18 days; range: 2 to 38 days).Rating scale data support the concurrent validity of screens and K-SADS-PL diagnoses. Interrater agreement in scoring screens and diagnoses was high (range: 93% to 100%). Test-retest reliability κ coefficients were in the excellent range for present and/or lifetime diagnoses of major depression, any bipolar, generalized anxiety, conduct, and oppositional defiant disorder (.77 to 1.00) and in the good range for present diagnoses of posttraumatic stress disorder and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (.63 to .67).Results suggest the K-SADS-PL generates reliable and valid child psychiatric diagnoses. J. Am. Acad. Child Adolesc. Psychiatry, 1997, 36(7): 980–988.

This paper uses the cases of Ebola and SARS-CoV-2 in the United States, looking for the use of panic discourses in presenting infectious diseases as apocalyptic crises in mediated popular culture (i.e. mass news media and social media). In 2014, the US was dealt its first cases of Ebola, a horrific virus not typically occurring outside of West Africa. Despite a small number of cases, Ebola never materialized as a pandemic despite instances of media hysterics. In 2020, Ebola paled in comparison to the slash and burn global spectacle of SARS-CoV-2. Many approaches in US mass media took a certain doom orientation in different ways as the pandemic unfolded over time. With both Ebola and SARS-CoV-2, there was a politicization of science in tandem with apocalyptic spectacle within media discourses. It is argued, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic filled a void of apocalyptic longing Ebola left unfulfilled. News coverage of both Ebola and SARS-CoV-2 uses manipulation of the idea public panic is common in approaching disaster situations. The concept of the 'Three acts of Trauma News' is used to explore these issues, especially with respect to the social construct of panic. Such spectacles are used in trauma journalism to heighten excitement and fear and are a fundamental element of security theater. Panic discourses underscore a problem of the human propensity for fantasy that undermines responses to disaster.

Mammalian brains contain at least 7 primal emotional systems--Seeking, Rage, Fear, Lust, Care, Panic and Play (capitalization reflects a proposed primary-process terminology, to minimize semantic confusions and mereological fallacies). These systems help organisms feel affectively balanced (e.g. euthymic) and unbalanced (e.g. depressive, irritable, manic), providing novel insights for understanding human psychopathologies. Three systems are especially important for understanding depression: The separation distress (Panic) system mediates the psychic pain of separation distress (i.e. excessive sadness and grief), which can be counteracted by minimizing Panic arousals (as with low-dose opioids). Depressive dysphoria also arises from reduced brain reward-seeking and related play urges (namely diminished enthusiasm (Seeking) and joyful exuberance (Play) which promote sustained amotivational states). We describe how an understanding of these fundamental emotional circuits can promote the...

One of the most disastrous forms of collective human behaviour is the kind of crowd stampede induced by panic, often leading to fatalities as people are crushed or trampled. Sometimes this behaviour is triggered in life-threatening situations such as fires in crowded buildings; at other times, stampedes can arise during the rush for seats or seemingly without cause. Although engineers are finding ways to alleviate the scale of such disasters, their frequency seems to be increasing with the number and size of mass events. But systematic studies of panic behaviour and quantitative theories capable of predicting such crowd dynamics are rare. Here we use a model of pedestrian behaviour to investigate the mechanisms of (and preconditions for) panic and jamming by uncoordinated motion in crowds. Our simulations suggest practical ways to prevent dangerous crowd pressures. Moreover, we find an optimal strategy for escape from a smoke-filled room, involving a mixture of individualistic behav...

Abstract: If modernity can be interpreted as an accelerating approximation to a crisis of undifferentiation, this paper will defend the notion of post-modernity, and argue that, as a determinate epoch that deserves a proper definition, it is the next step in Girard’s cycle. Post-modernity is a crisis of undifferentiation that has already exploded and, therefore, should be interpreted with a very special set of theoretical tools. After having introduced and thoroughly analysed the following concepts, this study will show that the paradigmatic loss of every sense of referentiality, the constant acceleration, and the growing sense of alienation with respect to social and political phenomena, are nothing but the symptoms of a well-known, autotranscendent social effervescence: this is an age that can best be described as panic-stricken.

Key Words: post-modernity, mimetic intentionality, acceleration, contagion, panic, endogenous fixed point, logic of collective phenomena.

The précis (or, an ABSTRACT, of sorts), as presented to an audience
at the 2016 Somatechnics Conference, Bundjalung Country,
Byron Bay, Australia (READ TO SELF):

The Darkening is a polyvocal performance script calling forth the
embodied linguistics of relational becoming. Presented at
Somatechnics 2016 as a queered academic panel, the work is ‘written
aloud’, to use Roland Barthes’s term (1976), employing the devices of
chorus, choralography, perpetual canon, echolalic vocality, singing and
story telling. In speaking/writing eir own stories the panellists fall into
the orbits of one another’s languaging, a harmonics of intratextuality
producing bodies as ‘events of expression’ (Bray and Colebrook
1998: 36). In the words of Abigail Bray and Claire Colebrook, these
bodies, rather than being ‘organised by representation’, are to be
understood in terms of ‘becomings, connections, events, and activities’
(1998: 36), in this case via a proliferation of speaking positions, the
materialisation of ulterior affective tones and self-reproducing texts that
reveal voices inside voices—a Matryoshka of utterance, black as river
pearls.
The panicked text explores the affective power of linguistic
redundancies resulting from the evacuation of subjectivity in the state
of an uncued panicked attack. Wild lines of deterritorialising flight
disrupt order-words, perform an unspeaking and makematter of mutter,
stutter and utter. Meaning is made of syntactical chaos, and of the ictic
dance of hands, feet and head.
The failing text presents ‘language lined with flesh’, where a
pre-(recorded) and post-testosterone voice performs an iterative and
echolalic paper from the body in transformation. The changing voice is
posited as a site of queer optimism for the person who changes, and
queer failure for those who do not. Following on from Jacques Derrida’s
critique of phonocentrism (1974), where voice is understood to be in
direct proximity to being, an interrogation of the desire to locate
subjectivity within the temporality of sound is performed, and a space
where written and spoken language collide is opened.
The witch-mother text holds an infant, glittering, splits the night sky
with eir howls. A line of stars dances from eir laughing mouth like a
garland of roses. Each flickering expression of being, each vitality form,
activates neuronic mirrors amongst eir familiars. Long before flesh is
worded up, we process arousal states, sensory inputs, emotional content, and narrative substance into a generative Gestalt: the subjective
experience of being alive.
As these storied patterns cross and cross over, new configurations
and assemblages of words are produced, designed to be uncradled and
(h)executed from different openings at the source. The iterative,
infinitely self-reproducing texts are uncountable, always already written.

One of the most disastrous forms of collective human behaviour is the kind of crowd stampede induced by panic, often leading to fatalities as people are crushed or trampled. Sometimes this behaviour is triggered in life-threatening situations such as fires in crowded buildings; at other times, stampedes can arise during the rush for seats or seemingly without cause. Although engineers are finding ways to alleviate the scale of such disasters, their frequency seems to be increasing with the number and size of mass events. But systematic studies of panic behaviour and quantitative theories capable of predicting such crowd dynamics are rare. Here we use a model of pedestrian behaviour to investigate the mechanisms of (and preconditions for) panic and jamming by uncoordinated motion in crowds. Our simulations suggest practical ways to prevent dangerous crowd pressures. Moreover, we find an optimal strategy for escape from a smoke-filled room, involving a mixture of individualistic behav...

The Panic of 1907 is often known as the Panic that initiated the development of the Federal Reserve System (Bordo, 1985). The Panic of 1907 was "The beginning of the end of unregulated capital markets and banking system without the lender of the last resort in the United States." (Fohlin, Gehrig and Haas, 2015, page 2). Numerous causes lead to the Panic of 1907 including: shadow banking, the San Francisco earthquake and fire, stock price manipulation, seasonal agriculture fluctuations, an outflow of gold, and higher interest rates. This paper reviews the primary literature on these causes, and how they led to the Panic of 1907 and the subsequent regulations culminating in the Federal Reserve Bank.

Previous studies suggested the importance of peritraumatic reactions as predictors of PSTD symptoms severity. Despite mounting evidence that tonic immobility occurs under intense life threats its role as predictor of PTSD severity remains by and large understudied. The objective of this study was to investigate the role of peritraumatic reactions (tonic immobility, panic and dissociation) as predictors of PTSD symptoms severity.Participants were 32 victims of urban violence with PTSD diagnosed through the SCID-I. In order to evaluate PTSD symptoms at baseline, we used the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Checklist — Civilian Version. To assess peritraumatic reactions we employed the Physical Reactions Scale, the Peritraumatic Dissociative Experiences Questionnaire and Tonic Immobility questions. As confounding variables, we considered negative affect (measured by the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule — Trait Version), sex and time elapsed since trauma.Tonic immobility was the only predictor of PTSD symptoms severity that kept the statistical significance after controlling for potential confounders.This study was based on a relatively small sample recruited in a tertiary clinic, a fact that may limit the generalizability of its findings. The retrospective design may have predisposed to recall bias.Our study provides good reason to conduct more research on tonic immobility in PTSD with other samples and with different time frames in an attempt to replicate these stimulating results.

There has been considerable speculation about a possible relationship between panic disorder and mitral valve prolapse syndrome (MVP), although empirical results have been highly inconsistent. Some studies report low frequencies of 0-8%, others high frequencies of 24-35% "definite" MVP in panic patients (average across 17 studies: 18% of panic patients, 1% of normal controls). Elevated prevalences of MVP were also reported for generalized anxiety disorder, bipolar affective disorder, and anorexia nervosa. Studies of MVP patients generally failed to find elevated prevalence of panic compared to other cardiac patients or normal controls (averages across seven studies: 14%, 10%, and 8%, respectively). Inconsistent results may be due to widely different diagnostic criteria for MVP, low reliability of this diagnosis, inadequate control groups, "non-blind" ratings of panic or MVP, and sampling bias in both patient and control populations. These problems as well as the ...

In this paper, we present a short overview of the people flow coordination methods and propose a multi-agent based route recommender architecture for smart spaces which considers the influence of stress on human reactions to the recommended routes. The objective of the architecture is to ensure that people can efficiently move in and among smart spaces while at the same time improve the overall system performance. The functioning of the architecture is demonstrated on a case study. The proposed approach can be used, among others, in route recommendation in smart cities, large public events, and emergency evacuations.