Panic Disorder

The Introduction traces the history of panic disorder back to the American Civil War in 1871 — Dr. Da Costa, observing soldiers with heart palpitations, sweating, trembling, and a choking sensation but no detectable organic heart disease, named the condition "irritable heart" syndrome.

During World War I, Lewis proposed the term "effort syndrome" for the same condition, while Oppenheim called it "neurocirculatory asthenia" — both describing the same clinical picture under different names.

Sigmund Freud, who laid the scientific foundation of psychology, proposed the concept of "anxiety neurosis" in 1895 and was the first scientist to demonstrate the link between panic disorder and agoraphobia.

Thanks to Klein's efforts, panic attack was first officially classified with the 1980 publication of the DSM-III — making Klein the scientist who brought the term "panic attack" into psychiatric literature.

The chapter then turns to the clinical problem: patients with panic disorder typically go to the emergency room fearing a heart attack, and once no organic cause is found, are referred to psychiatry, where they are usually prescribed antidepressants or anxiolytics — but according to the author's own 2013 research, cognitive behavioral therapy is underused in Turkey.

This gap — medication alone rather than medication plus psychotherapy — leaves patients uninformed about their condition, causes them to focus on physical symptoms in a way that triggers new attacks, and traps them in a vicious cycle of anticipatory anxiety and agoraphobia.

• A dense citation apparatus (Özkan, Tükel, Ceylan and Yazan, Aksoy) sources every claim
• The historical development is presented chronologically (1871 → World War I → 1895 Freud → 1980 Klein), letting readers trace how the concept took shape
• The author cites his own doctoral research (2013), adding a personal scientific contribution to the book