Hello all, I was hoping you might be able to help me! My 12 year old son had an incident at school the other day that I'm thinking might have been a panic attack. Unfortunately it escalated into a de-facto three-day suspension from school.
I have no experience in panic or anxiety attacks, but after this happened I got myself onto the Internet, did a ton of research, figured out that might be it, and ended up here. J.C. was in math class, with the teacher reviewing for an upcoming test. He had already told me the previous week that math "is really stressing me out this quarter" and felt that he was falling behind. All of a sudden he said he started to feel weird: "angry and confused and sad." The teacher says he suddenly started laughing nervously and saying things like "Numbers ... all these numbers and facts coming at me." He started twisting and turning his neck and pulling at his cheek. (the cheek pulling he does sometimes when he gets stressed; the neck thing seems new to me.) At this point all the kids were looking at him, so the teacher took him out of the class. He couldn't determine the problem so he took J.C. to the guidance office.
This is where it all went horribly wrong. My son's version of events is that the guidance counselor said to him something like "don't worry, help is on the way." He says that this made him really nervous and scared; he thought she meant that he was going to be taken away in an ambulance, and he voiced his terror like this: "I know what's going to happen now. You're going to call an ambulance and it's going to take me to a mental hospital for years and years; then when I come out I'm going to go crazy and kill people, right?" What the counselor reported is that J.C. said "I want to go into a mental hospital, and when I come out I'm going to kill everybody."
I think this was around the time I was called and told only that my son was "in crisis" and that I had to come immediately. Fortunately I was very close to school and I probably got there in five minutes, though how I didn't crash the car I'll never know! By the time I got there J.C. was sitting quietly and looked absolutely normal, though a little pale. He was also talking and acting normal. I took him home and he was fine.
Later I found the symptoms of panic attack on the Internet. WITHOUT PROMPTING HIM, I asked him what he was feeling in math class. He said, “Angry, confused and sad.” I said, “Okay, those were your emotions. Now tell me how your body felt.” He said he felt “twitchy,” he was breathing fast, and he kept moving his neck and rocking back and forth “because I was nervous.” I asked about pulling on his face and he said, “I do that when I get stressed.” He also stated that he felt “dizzy” and that “everything looked bigger” and “everything seemed funny” (peculiar, not comical). Then, in the only prompt I gave, I said, “Did you kind of feel like you were going crazy?” and he said, “Uh … yeah,” as if to say “isn’t that obvious?”
Now one of his biggest fears is that his friends are going to think he's crazy. One of my biggest fears is that it's going to happen again and he won't know what to do.
Do you think this sounds like a panic attack? If so, has anyone ever gone out of control like that during a panic attack -- saying bizarre things, not being able to stop yourself (that's what it felt like to him). And do you have any other suggestions for me?
I'm planning to also consult an anxiety treatment center near where I live, but it takes a while to get an appointment and in the meantime I'm just a frantic mom.
Thanks so much for any help you can offer ...
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