 Hello. I'm Willard Scott. Usually when I appear in front of a camera, it's to give the weather report or deliver birthday greetings to one of our most senior citizens. Today I'm here for a very different reason. You see, about 30 years ago, driving across a bridge in South Carolina, I had an experience which had an enormous impact on my life. I was a relatively young man. I had a great job, a devoted family, and I was in good physical health. But suddenly, driving over that bridge, I was filled with terror, convinced I was having a heart attack. It wasn't the first time this had happened to me, but this time I knew that something powerful was going on. Shortly after that, I learned I was having panic attacks and that I was suffering from panic disorder. I also found the help I needed and I've learned to manage panic attacks so they don't interfere with my life. I've also learned that millions of other people suffer from panic disorder. Like me on that bridge almost 30 years ago, many of them know that something is terribly wrong, but they don't know quite what it is. Three people with panic disorder appear in this video to tell their stories. If their stories sound familiar to you, if my story is sounded familiar to you, watch carefully, because what you're about to see are above all stories of hope. When Chuck Jackson goes to church each Sunday in the Indiana town where he lives, he no longer sits in the back row so that he can escape without notice. Laura Schei can now make the trip from her Los Angeles home to visit her infant niece in Burbank. And from her neighborhood in the Bronx, Tammy Holland can once again confidently take a crowded bus to work. Laura and Chuck and Tammy have never met, but each vividly remembers that first confrontation with their shared enemy. Both at home, late in the evening, what I thought was a relaxed situation. Close to my home and just out of the blue. The land was completely flat with no trees and no shade. And it seemed to me, I got this feeling that the whole world was closing in on me. I started having palpitations. I started sweating. And what happened was is I thought I was actually having a heart attack. I couldn't get my breath. I felt like I could get a heart attack. I started to get nauseated. It just it starts to escalate and I get lightheaded and just like, I'm gonna die. And then I got real, I mean, really, really scared. I don't remember ever being that scared before. These episodes panic attacks were frightening enough. But as the attacks continued, it was what happened next that had the most profound impact on these people's lives. Every time it would occur in a situation, that would be the next thing I would avoid. Avoidance behavior is the most disabling symptom of panic disorder. Psychiatrist Dr. Frida Lewis Hall explains. Well, panic disorder can cause from very limited impairment to very, very severe impairment. Much of the impairment comes not from the panic attacks themselves, but what happens between attacks? If they had a panic attack on the bus, they stopped riding the bus. If they had one in the grocery store, they stopped going to the grocery store. And before you know it, their world becomes smaller and smaller and smaller. As long as I avoid, I'm basically I'm okay. But my radius is so small. I'm highly functional in a very small area. Laura Schei is highly functional. A single parent, she supports herself and her nine-year-old daughter, Alisa, ironically as a travel agent. Planning around the world trip for a client is easy, but getting herself around town requires extraordinary planning. She lays out her route in tedious detail to keep herself feeling safe, free from any situation that she thinks might trigger a panic attack. Because the prospect of a panic attack is so terrifying and the sense of danger during an attack is so real, she makes sure she knows where to find emergency services along her route. I'll go through my road map and look at the routes that I'm most likely to take. I will find every fire station because they're labeled and I highlight them. Dr. Jack Orman, a specialist in treating panic disorder, explains that this effort to stay in safe places is typical. As people continue to have their panic attacks if they're not treated, some people become afraid to go places where they might have a panic attack and in which they fear they can't get help right away. Laura suffers from the limits panic disorder places on her life and she also worries about the effect her panic disorder will have on Lisa. I feel bad when she's frightened. I feel bad when I know she's feeling like she wants to take care of mommy. It's not supposed to be that way. Mommy's just supposed to take care of little girls. Laura worries about Lisa for another reason. Experts say that panic disorder runs in families. Laura recalls feelings of panic when she was her daughter's age. I never liked amusement park rides. I didn't like anything upsetting at all. Motion as a child. The teacups at Disneyland you spin. If I think back now I had a panic attack. This may look like child's play but it's part of a treatment called cognitive behavioral therapy. It's carefully designed to help Laura tame the demons that have plagued her since she was a little girl. Really focus on the sensations. Dr. Michelle Crask meets with Laura weekly at the University of California at Los Angeles. Together they are trying to evoke in Laura the sensations, dizziness or shortness of breath that are the hallmarks of her panic attacks. All right stop. What are you feeling? I think you can move away from the table and just walk around. Let yourself feel that weak, dizzy feeling. Keep moving. Great. I mean if I had done this someplace else I wouldn't be too happy right now. Because the safety of the environment helps you. Cognitive therapy which was really introduced fairly recently tries to target the negative thoughts, the negative images that go through the person's mind, that irrational quality to fear. Experts point out that treatment for panic disorder involves medication or cognitive behavioral therapy or both. I'd like you to spend a couple of minutes we'll just lean against the wall here and practice doing some of the slow breathing. Working with Dr. Crask, Laura puts her new skills to the test reclaiming territory that she had lost to panic disorder. Exposure training, confronting situations that she has avoided for so long is an element of Laura's therapy. Laura continues her therapy to manage her fear. She also takes medication to keep her panic attacks at bay. If the road back for Laura seems tedious, she reminds us that to her it's filled with victories. There was a time when getting to work was a big accomplishment for me. I was having panic attacks going between here and my office three miles away. It's a bigger effort. What did I just read recently that the test of success in one's life is not what you achieve but the obstacles you overcame to achieve it and I do it every day. That's good. Gotta keep doing it. Chuck Jackson is also doing things these days that he hasn't done in years. Chuck and his wife Karen live in this frame house they designed and built for themselves in the green Indiana countryside. They have been married for almost 30 years. Shortly after they wed, Chuck served a tour of duty in Vietnam. He says nothing he saw in Southeast Asia inspired the same terror he felt during his first panic attack on a hot summer day near Kokomo. Chuck still has the car he was driving when he had that first panic attack and on a sunny day he will take it for a drive. But for years to avoid the heat he thought might trigger an attack, he left home only to go to work. When I wasn't working I was spending my days in the basement where it was cool. Heat was a terrible thing and in southern Indiana with the humidity I didn't want to go outside at all. As the fear of panic attacks began to reshape his life even the familiar three-hour drive to his parents home for Thanksgiving dinner was too terrifying to complete. I said I can make it. We turned around again. This time we made 10 miles and I couldn't make it so I had to go back and call my parents and tell them that we weren't going to make it. Couldn't make it to Thanksgiving. We would go away then we turn back then we go away then we turn back. I think it was more than twice I think it was maybe three four or five times we tried it you know and getting more upset each time and of course nothing prepared at home so we had a dismal Thanksgiving dinner in a restaurant while the whole family was 150 miles north of us. Chuck repeatedly sought help with appropriate medication he was able to continue working and support his family but he still avoided any place he thought might trigger an attack and his phobias as much as the attacks themselves diminished his life. We're pretty sure that if you let that go on it gets harder and harder to treat that is that people become so accustomed to these phobias that even if you can block their panic attacks the phobias may get a life of their own and the person may continue to have a hard time going places. For almost two decades Chuck never left the state of Indiana and while their two children Jenny and Adam grew from babies to teenagers to young adults Chuck and Karen felt cheated by the limits that panic disorder imposed on their family life there was a lot of guilty feeling about not being able to take our children on trips the way other families did you know other kids who go to Disney world and things like that and we couldn't do that. I was afraid I'd be living this way all my life but I didn't want to. I wanted to find relief. Four years ago Karen Jackson learned about a nearby psychologist who was treating people with Chuck's symptoms. He gave us some tools he showed us how to do in vivo training where you went into a situation just a little bit and then pulled back and then a little bit farther and pulled back. With the help of the training and continued medication Chuck's world began to expand. His biggest challenge came when his daughter Jenny decided to go to college in Pennsylvania. Chuck didn't know until the Sunday morning she left if he would try to make the drive with her and Karen. I went to church by myself and I halfway hoped that they would be gone when I got home. I halfway hoped and they weren't so I climbed in and I kept thinking every place we went well let's see. I can stop and stay here until I get back. I can stop and stay here and then we got into Ohio and I was in the back with my earphones on and the curtains pulled on the van and we got into Ohio and all of a sudden I started feeling I made it. I made it this far. Maybe I can make it farther and it was after that the trip just was a dream. Chuck is no longer in therapy. He still takes medication to control his fear of having a panic attack and he says every day he works a little at completely taming his panic disorder. This morning in church for instance he sat only seven rows from the front closer than ever before. Another thing that we did today that I haven't done in years and that was sit on the aisle. I always sit on the far side by the window by the side aisle so I won't make a stir if I have to get up and leave. So this today was a good test for me. Chuck measures his progress in what may look like small steps even as small as the distance between pews in a country church but to Chuck those small steps add up to a world without boundaries. I got my life back. Yeah the fact that I'm free to travel that I'm free to go wherever I want to. It's like being born again. Tammy Holland lives a world away from Chuck Jackson but she sounds remarkably like him when she talks about her victory over panic disorder. I felt like I had regained my life. My life was under control again and it was mine. Tammy and Walter Cobbs live in the South Bronx. Hey Walter, stop snowing. Why don't we go out? Go for a walk. Not too long ago a walk in the park away from the security of home her safe place would have been full of hidden terror. Wow listen to the trees. Yeah I know right you hear that. Yeah. Tammy had her first panic attack only four years ago when she was 29. It seemed as if I was having a heart attack. At that moment I became kind of frantic and I couldn't calm down. I couldn't calm down at all and it got totally blown out of proportion to the point where I thought I was dying. Walter called an ambulance and went with Tammy to a nearby hospital. They told me there was nothing wrong with me. They told me to calm down and they couldn't find anything wrong with me and that made me a little more upset because there was something that I knew was wrong with me. I was having physical symptoms and I couldn't accept what they were telling me you know that all I had to do was calm down that maybe I was stressed out or something like that and they just sent me home. They just sent me home. Tammy withdrew into her apartment seeing it as the only safe place in the world. Like Chuck Jackson, Tammy felt her life shrink into a monotonous round of home and work. I was at my wit's in with everyone telling me there's nothing wrong with you. Finally, Tammy found Dr. Jack Gorman. He knew exactly what was wrong with her and how to help. When he explained to me what the cognitive behavioral therapy was going to do for me and what kind of exercises we were going to go through and things like that, I started crying because I was just so happy that I finally got to the point where I said, hey, this is it. This is this is where I need to be. This is what I've been looking for. I just didn't know there was a specific name for it. Tammy continued on the medication she had been taking and began cognitive behavioral therapy with Dr. Gorman. Her life turned around almost immediately. Experts say that it can take some time to find the right treatment, medication or therapy or a combination. Tammy's message and Dr. Gorman's keep trying until the right treatment is found. The first step is to make sure you're with a doctor or a therapist who is open-minded and doesn't say I don't believe in medication or I don't believe in psychotherapy. These are not religions and they're not subject to belief. They're subject to scientific studies and also to what works for an individual patient. There's no reason I feel that anyone should have to live like that. There's help out there whether it's psychotherapy, whether it's medication, whether it's cognitive behavioral therapy. There's definitely help out there and they shouldn't feel hopeless. They shouldn't feel hopeless at all. You better not let me fall. If you recognized yourself or someone you know in any of the people that we've just seen or if you or someone you know has experienced symptoms like theirs, call this number 1-800-64-PANIC. You'll receive information about treatments that can help. Panic disorder is real and treatable.