How I've fought my panic attacks

Here, in an emotional and entertaining account, she talks of the years of therapy, her journey to find a cure and how she has raised a family despite her personal turmoil.

I was in the Everyman cinema in Hampstead - it's the kind of place where you get coffee and walnut cake rather than Coke and crisps. I mention this just to make it clear that it's not in the crime centre of the universe. My husband and I sat in the front row and I sank down with my head below the top of the seat to watch the film. I do this so that if anyone starts shooting from the back of the theatre I might survive the massacre.

In the supermarket (before 11 September, which I must admit has slightly vindicated some of my lunacy) I saw a man loading his trolley with tins of tuna. Hundreds of them. This struck me as such suspicious behaviour that I abandoned my shopping and ran out of the shop, my heart pounding and breathing short, afraid that he might have explosives strapped to him - a former employee with a grudge. That kind of thing.

It was at this stage, after more than a decade of trying everything I could think of, that I decided Prozac might be the thing. There has been a lot of publicity about the new breed of anti-depressants, the side effects they can cause and the difficulty some people have had trying to come off them. What this publicity does not seem to take into account is that when you are so anxious that you run out of shops at the slightest sign of shadiness on the part of a fellow shopper, the last thing you are worried about is how to come off the drugs. As a frightened person, and apparently there are more of us than ever, what you are keen to do is get the hell on them.

I am terrified of flying, the Tube, lifts, tunnels, motorways and, linking all the fears together nicely, death. My hypochondria is so bad that I have rushed myself to casualty more than once with heart attacks (actually panic attacks), brain tumours (actually panic attacks) and chronic breathlessness (actually a panic attack).

Ever since I can remember I have had trouble sleeping, mostly because I want to be alert when the building catches fire; someone breaks in; the world ends. That is not to say that I appear to be a shivering wreck to your casual observer. In fact, I suspect that I appear more confident and together than most people. My life continues as normal, but fear lurks, ready to knock me flat at any time.

I have recently discovered that my madness has a name - GAD (General Anxiety Disorder) - in America, of course. Apparently, this is often overlooked as a complaint because it is not a specific, and therefore treatable, phobia like, say, fear of spiders. Because there are so many terrors to contend with, it is much more of a "for Christ's sake pull yourself together" situation. My view entirely, except that it doesn't seem to be much of a cure.

Unlike, for example, alcohol. This was my first effort at a cure. I suppose I noticed its positive effects at about 15.

Alcohol is a fantastic cure for generalised anxiety. One glass of wine immediately stops the stomach butterflies flapping, slackens the clenched jaw muscles, eases open the clamped throat and takes your mind off hyperventilating. It took a year or so of vile vodka hangovers to make me realise that too much to drink made the fear slightly worse. Not all that surprisingly, there is only a certain amount of this kind of treatment that the central nervous system can handle.

When I was only 22, I gave up smoking, joined a gym and started eating as much broccoli as I could stuff in. This was the healthy-body-healthy-mind phase. With step classes and Jacuzzis came valerian tea at bedtime, tapes of dolphins to soothe me to sleep, Rescue Remedy in my handbag, rose quartz crystals in my pocket and a penny in my loafer. Frightened people are very superstitious. If saluting a magpie and picking up a penny might save me, hey, I'll do it.

Uncool, definitely, but a lot more effective than drinking. At least it seemed more effective until I went to Disneyland a couple of years later. I do appreciate that most of the adults in Disneyland are clinging feebly on to their last shreds of sanity, but they are, on the whole, not leaving their two young sisters at the rodeo display unsupervised to lie on the floor outside trying to recover from a heart attack. Nor are they shivering in fear all night fighting off other fatal illnesses or, if occasionally slipping into half-sleep, dreaming about plane crashes, lifts plummeting, ships sinking and gunmen lurking. I, on the other hand, was.

The day I got back I phoned a Kleinian psychoanalyst. This works. There is no denying that it is like being in a New Yorker cartoon, lying on a couch while someone behind you takes notes and occasionally says: "Why do you think I think you think that?" But, once the ludicrousness is overcome, the results are irrefutable. The thesis, I think, is that by finding the very root of the fear it somehow becomes manageable and, eventually, non-existent. Almost immediately things in general began, inexplicably, to look up. After six months I could sleep, and after about a year and a half I felt completely cured. I went into a museum and saw a bag, alone, by a sink in the loo. Rather than run screaming into the street, I handed it into lost property. I felt so good that, aged 27, I was able to get married and have two children swiftly afterwards.

The trouble with analysis is that it is extremely expensive - more than £35 a session. I would have sold my flat to pay for it when I first started, but once I felt better and had two children my mental state slipped down the list of financial priorities. Then, on 11 September, when it suddenly looked as though the world actually was about to end, my own lunacy notwithstanding, I, along with a lot of other people previously teetering on the edge of mental stability, went into psychological meltdown.

When I went into analysis I promised myself that if it didn't work I would spend the rest of my life on Prozac, or whatever else was supposed to work for perpetual terror.

I suppose I should mention here that the television news and world affairs have always been central to my madness. I grew up with a journalist father or, in fact, largely without a journalist father who was always at whatever horrific war was being broadcast. When he wasn't being shot at himself he would watch the news nervously as though it concerned him personally, his family and friends, which, of course, it did. Eventually, he was killed in a dusty, sweltering war zone and there he was, on the television news, being rushed along on a stretcher. It was with him that I went up the Twin Towers when I was 11.

"You don't seem depressed," the doctor said when I told him what I was after. "I'm not exactly depressed,"I tried to explain, and told him about the Everyman. He prescribed Cipramil, citalopram hydrobromide, one of the new generation of anti-depressant drugs. The side effects are listed as nausea, dryness of mouth and increased anxiety for the initial week to 10 days.

What it doesn't say is that you feel sicker than when you are six weeks pregnant, your mouth is so dry you can barely swallow and you go into a kind of blind panic as though being chased by an armed psychopath. Then he prescribed some Diazepam to calm me down. So now I was taking one drug to counter the effects of the other like a crack addict taking heroin to get to sleep. As someone who has never taken drugs outside hospital I found this pretty depressing and felt worse than ever.

Not to mention the acne. Rising serotonin levels in my brain give me acne. I phoned the doctor almost every night to complain about the side effects. "Keep going," he said. "I think there is an 85 per cent chance of you getting positive results from this."

I kept going. After all, this was the only option still available to me.

Two weeks into the citalopram, I spent a whole day shut in our tiny flat with two feverish children who were suffering from chronic vomiting and diarrhoea. I hadn't slept for 24 hours. However, I was chirpy and sunny and wondered why on earth my husband was looking so gloomy. "Drugs seem to be working," he said as I skipped out to the pub in the invigorating rain for a restorative drink with beloved friends. It wasn't as good as my brief period of complete sanity, but it was a hell of a lot better than the nagging fear.

The best thing about it was that I wasn't tired all the time. Being constantly frightened is exhausting, especially when you are looking after toddlers. I was energetic, optimistic and dynamic, if a bit manic. Anyway, I was much more fun with the kids.

Then, in December, the drugs stopped working as suddenly as they had started. The whole of Christmas was a breathless coma of panic. The doctor upped my dose - still nothing. Then he changed course and put me on the impressive-sounding Arnold Shwarzenegger of a drug, Effexor, or venlafaxine hydrochloride. When taking Effexor, the contained slip of paper says you should tell your doctor if you suffer, among other things, from swollen face or tongue, shortness of breath, confusion, hypomania, unusual bruising or bleeding, irregular heart beat, hallucinations or blurred vision. As a drug which is supposed to help with hypochondria that doesn't instil much confidence. I developed all the above within seconds of reading about them.

Still, in the early stages, I'm being encouraged to plough on and see how it goes. The doctor says I can come straight off whenever I want to as I haven't been taking it long enough to have to stop slowly so as to minimise withdrawal symptoms.

It is incredibly disappointing that the last resort doesn't work. I think most of us sneakingly believe that, if all else fails, there is some kind of happy drug to take it all away. Well, basically there isn't. At this stage I'm pretty much ready to go back to a combination of wine, step classes, broccoli and analysis. That is, unless Effexor suddenly starts Effexoring.