People pre-dispositioned to Anxiety are also pre-dispositioned to OCD. I didn't know I had OCD sypmtoms until after the whole episode, which made the symptoms MUCH more noticable.
You're not listening.
Again, I had NEVER in my life had a panic attack until that incident. Within a span of 3 days after my insomnia incident, I started having them every few hours until I had to go to the ER.
I had never had a panic attack until that day when I took those drugs. My anxiety baseline increased dramatically after that whole episode. Fear starts to fuel those new PHYSICAL symptoms. All the fears you've had before that you could just brush off now add FUEL to that anxiety, which induces panic. Its a feedback loop that gets worse and worse, unless you fix the symptoms, which is the anxiety. If you can treat the physical symptoms of anxiety, then you can start to decouple the thoughts you have with those physical symptoms. This breaks the feedback loop and breaks the panic disorder. Whether you do that with SSRIs or other methods is up to you.
I never discounted what you have experienced.
I will challenge people when they make statements that are unsupported by the evidence.
You hear people say "once you have a panic attack you're more likely to have more", but the numbers and the science says that not the case.
The overwhelming majority of people never have another panic attack, otherwise, 35% of people would have panic disorder because 35% of people have at least one panic attack.
The numbers actually show somewhere between 10% and 20% of people that have panic attacks and up developing panic disorder (about 3% to 7% of the general population)
I'm not minimizing what you've experienced, I am not saying it didn't happen.
Even in the post I'm directly responding to you say
" I didn't know I had OCD symptoms until after..."
A reasonable person would take that to mean that the whole episode exposed some pre-existing OCD behaviors.
Yes, people with OCD are predisposed to anxiety, and people with anxiety are predisposed to panic disorder.
Yes, there are instances where drugs induce panic attacks.
The instances where drugs cause panic disorder are vanishingly small. The instances where drugs expose panic disorder or contribute to an exacerbation of OCD/ anxiety etc. Are many and frequent.
I would also caution against blaming it all on MDMA which you are not certain the substance actually was because you didn't have it laboratory tested.
Furthermore, the most common substance that exacerbates, uncovers, or contributes to the development of anxiety disorders is marijuana. Marijuana causes panic attacks, frequently, much more frequently than MDMA does.
In fact, the use of marijuana almost doubles your likelihood of developing panic disorder
This study examined the relations between marijuana use and panic attacks and panic disorder using a large representative survey of adults (N = 5,672; 53% women; M[age] = 45.05 years, SD = 17.9) conducted in the United States (). After adjusting for ...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au
emedicine.medscape.com
