How It Started

My first battle with panic disorder and agoraphobia was in 2015 upon my return to Australia after spending one year in Japan as an exchange student. At the time, I had no choice in my return home. Time was up, and all I knew was that I wasn't ready yet. What I was returning to was a world full of uncertainty, and the moment the plane touched down back in Melbourne I knew it was going to be an uphill battle. I didn’t just leave behind Japan; I left behind the life I built there, my friendships, families, and it felt like I was leaving my happiness behind, too.

In my first two weeks back home I felt okay, perhaps “too” okay. I was emotionally numb. I expected so many tears from the world I left behind, but I felt nothing, up until I woke up one morning and it had hit me. The gut-wrenching anxiety manifested itself overnight and hit me like a train. I became increasingly anxious around my uncertain circumstances, being unemployed, having no plan, with parents having separated while I was in Japan and having little financial support.

In an attempt to dig myself out of the vicious cycle I was in, I thought working and developing a routine would help me. I found a workplace on a pay rate that was borderline illegal, which was about a 45 minute bus trip away. I vividly remember stepping onto the bus on the first day of work, sitting down, and feeling the sudden surge of adrenaline that went through my body that ensued a panic attack. My mind created an association of panic attacks with buses, and things only went further downhill from there. I developed a fear of public transport, and day by day it felt like my world was closing in further and further. It took a matter of many months, but through exposure therapy I managed to overcome my fear and get back out into the world again. Life started to look up, as 2018 marked the beginning of my career which shaped the last four years of my life.

2022 has had a lot in store for me. I had a strong start by landing my dream job as my world of international travel re-opened after two years of the pandemic, but perhaps I flew too high. With the mounting stress from my work trip as I still adjusted to my new job, while I prepared to move house as my lease expired, things came tumbling down. Shortly after returning home from the US, I started experiencing a series of random onset panic attacks that occurred when I was away from home. I would be sitting at a restaurant and suddenly my body would be filled with more adrenaline than one would know what to do with. I started to fear going to places where I would feel "trapped", like cinemas and restaurants.

One evening, a group of friends invited me out to a bar. I was extremely ambivalent about the idea, but felt like it only made sense to push through my fears and go. I had no idea at the time, but the agoraphobia was slowly creeping back. As I got dressed and prepared to leave, the sense of dread started to kick in. I felt sick even just imagining the environment I would be in, and had a panic attack before I even left home. I took some anti-anxiety medication which eased my nerves, and went on my way. I felt a sense of calm over me, likely only attributable to my medication, only up until a few minutes into my walk to the bar where the dread kicked in again and left me like a deer in the headlights. The panic had hit me harder than I've ever felt before, even overpowering the effects of the medication I took. What was only a few minutes walk felt like miles from home, and I rushed back filled with panic and regret. Even after returning home I was in a state of panic which was felt so bad that I told my partner I would rather be dead. I fell asleep only from exhaustion, and woke up the next day afraid to even open my front door. That was the straw that broke the camel's back.

Agoraphobia develops slowly. My psychologist explained that when it develops, the brain misfires and leads us to believe that being anywhere outside of our home will present us with grave danger, so much so that even the local supermarket is life or death. The good news about agoraphobia is that it responds well to treatment. The bad news is that you have to put yourself through hell to overcome it. Exposure therapy is a methodical approach to agoraphobia where you reverse the vicious cycle by intentionally provoking short-term panic and anxiety, remain in the situation instead of escaping it, which then provides lasting relief. Exposure typically commences at the lowest point on the hierarchy of feared situations and needs to be graduated, repeated, and prolonged.

After I hit my lowest point and was almost housebound, I bounced back rather quickly and within three weeks I went from being unable to leave my door to comfortably going to the supermarket, and walking about 2 kilometres from home. I was on an upwards trajectory and felt like my world was opening up sooner than I had anticipated.

“We just don’t know what life is going to give us.”

My psychologist introduced the philosophy of absurdism to me. He told me that it started with the nihilists who said, “There’s no point to life.” which was a reaction to the religious who said, “God is the purpose of everything.” Existentialists then stepped in and said, “It’s our job to make our own purpose.” Then came the absurdists, “We tried making our own purpose and it didn’t work because we got hit by a car.” The point being that life can be random and cruel.

I say this because right as things were getting better, life decided it had other plans for me. As I was in the midst of moving house, my neighbours' apartment was drug-busted which had the police outside our door for the next three days. A stressful event which followed the day we moved house, where I had a full-blown panic attack and entered a high baseline state of anxiety again. The drop of a pencil could send me into shock. Shortly after we moved house my girlfriend tested positive for COVID-19.

They say that things get worse before they get better, and that when it rains it pours. I can attest to that. I started self-isolating from my partner after she tested positive. I was in the bedroom, she was in the lounge room, and I spent almost every waking minute on the bed as a result. After a couple of nights I found myself having trouble getting to sleep, likely from poor sleep hygiene. This manifested into a cycle of fearing whether or not I'd be able to sleep at night, and I developed anxiety-induced acute insomnia. I was already struggling with panic disorder, but sleep deprivation compounded onto that was a hell I hope to never revisit. My lowest point was on a Friday morning at 4:00 A.M., I laid on the couch trying to cry myself to sleep as I became desperate for a moment of shut-eye as sleep deprivation ticked away at my body. My mind no longer accepted that sleep was an option, and the moment I would drift off I would jolt awake in a panic as if my mind was telling me it wasn’t done with me yet. Every limb in my body felt like it was on fire from my body operating on nothing but adrenaline and cortisol for days. My heart was pounding so hard I could feel each pulse in every vein in my body. I was so overwhelmed with anxiety and panic that I felt like I was going to meet my maker.

I found myself in a state so desperate that I was calling every psychiatric ward number I found, trying to get a slither of help in what I felt was a crisis. The more I searched and understood, the more I began to realise just how poor our crisis options for mental health services are in Australia. You can either call the emergency number and wait several hours for an ambulance, only to be taken through a disturbing and lacking public health system where you’ll wait several hours and be told to go home, or be lucky enough to have an expensive private health insurance plan be admitted to a private psychiatric hospital. The latter is assuming you can make it through the days that it takes for you to be pulled out of the waiting list. Thankfully I was in a fortune position where I did have private health insurance, and so I requested a referral from my doctor to be admitted. I felt like it was the only place I could get help. It was no doubt that the sleep deprivation was driving me mad, and so I worked with my doctor to try different types of sleeping medication in the meantime to break out of my horrific insomnia.

10 days later, I'm glad to say that it feels like the hardest part is over. I worked towards developing better sleep hygiene, and used sleeping medication as an aid to create a structured sleep routine again. The psychiatric hospital I referred myself to called me to say they had a bed available, but after some forethought and discussion with my psychologist we agreed that it wasn't the right call, and it would be better to not rock the boat if I'm already on an upwards trajectory. With that said, there's still a lot of work to do. My days are filled with much less anxiety and panic now, but in the last month the farthest I've gone is about a hundred metres from home. I'll still continue to spend my days putting work into getting out into the world again, and focus on the positives that will lead to my path of recovery.