Signs and symptoms of panic attacks are typically the most prevalent among people between the ages of 15 and 40. In the younger age range, attacks tend to start manifesting themselves by about 16 years of age, while a handful of others could be hit by them even earlier than that. One study in particular found that a patient can even be four years old and experience them. Many have held the belief that panic attacks were exclusive to adult patients, but it’s more obvious than ever that this simply isn’t true.
The findings mentioned above looked at roughly three hundred child patients, from four years old to nineteen years old. They were patients being treated for psychiatric problems that suffered from a variety of mental health problems that stemmed from anti-social problems, or obsessive-compulsive issues and not necessarily for panic attacks. That being said the researchers discovered that more than one quarter of the subjects, had been experiencing panic attacks. This is no way suggests that a quarter of our children experience panic attacks, but it does confirm that youngsters do have attacks, and that there is a likelihood that they may be linked to other problems.
Of course, not everyone in this field of study is a believer that children, especially very young ones, really do have panic attacks as such – or any kind of physical symptoms of anxiety attacks for that matter. Still, it’s been proven that, that even though kids don’t always feel as much fear leading up to or in the middle of an attack like grownups do, they can still experience the same bodily sensations as the rest of us. An absence of fear shouldn’t be all that surprising. Children, in their innocence, often do things which adults wouldn’t dare, while adult panic attack patients have more experience with all of the potential dangers and tragedies in life.
Of course there are many parents who have had to save their child from a potential perilous situation, followed by wails of confusion as their ‘innocent’ adventure (climbing out on the upstairs window-sill, for example) comes to a sudden end. So, although children’s perception of what they experience may not be labeled by them as panic, the description of what actually happens to them physically does fit.
Panic Personality
At the same time that there are panic personality theories about adults, you’ll find similar schools of thought with regards to children and corresponding cure anxiety symptoms. Many have reported these children are often shy, ambivalent and unassertive. Similar to their grown-up counterparts, they may feel a severe lack of confidence. They have a tendency to think very poorly of themselves, and that they are lacking in many areas.
They tend to think of themselves in terms that are often marked by disapproval. For instance, they
might think they do very badly at school, whereas the truth is they are doing well. Expectations they have of themselves, and those they think others have of them, to do their best no matter what tend to be the root cause of their self-loathing and the like.
Due to such poor levels of self-confidence, these kids are also much more vulnerable to things like criticism, rejection and other social issues, and may avoid doing anything which they think might incur it. If they fear they won’t be able to do something successfully, this fear will drive them away from trying altogether. So instead of being bold and daring, as most children are in the thrill and excitement of childhood with so much to explore and discover children with panic personalities often avoid risks altogether.
Depriving themselves of these experiences because of their poor self-image, lack of self-confidence, and their overall fear of not measuring up, these children are among the most vulnerable to complications stemming from high anxiety.
As you can see, there are many similarities among children and adults who suffer from panic attacks.
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