Mary lee
Mary lee is a 20 years old female. She has no previous important medical history. On a Monday afternoon, Mary enters the emergency room in fear of having a heart attack. She had experienced incidents of momentous chest pain, numbness in her arm, and difficulties in breathing. She then explains to her physician in the emergency room that she was walking her dog earlier in the afternoon when she began sweating. Since it was not hot outside, she failed to understand the reason for her sweating. Her heart was pounding hard that she thought it would explode, she explains. Her knees felt weak, and her whole body began to shake, and her arms went numb, which lasted a few minutes. The physician gave Mary a thorough physical examination, but all the tests were coming back in the normal range, which suggested that she did not have a heart attack. The lack of medical abnormalities in her trial made the physician conclude that Jane had a panic attack, and he referred her to a clinical psychologist.
After two weeks, Mary sees the psychologist and reports that she had experienced over four dozen panic attacks with similar symptoms since her time in the emergency room. At this point, her daily functioning had become impaired since she had started avoiding friends, School, walking her dog, and time with family as she thought that it would trigger another attack. There is no concrete source of anxiety or fear in Mary’s life other than fear of attacks themselves.
Mary continues to suffer from panic disorder to the extent that she could not attend her lecture class; she could not concentrate, study for the exams or even sit for an exam. She also avoids getting close to her college and anything relevant to the university. She fears that she might get a heart attack in the presence of individuals. She becomes unable to decide whether she should get her college degree or not since she is ever in a general state of anxiety about anything. She wants to be perfect in everything, but she is ever worried about other people’s critics since she does not want to develop any heart attack in others’ presence. She thinks of the college all the time, but she cannot enjoy the privilege of being at college because of her anxiety about the heart attack. This makes her not able to enjoy herself and which makes her feel sad. This anxiety makes her avoid people and crowded places as far as her psychological complaints are concerned. As this heart attack anxiety continues, Mary develops more complications such as permanent headache, fatigue, and loss of energy. All of these are due to her fear and disappointments she has to go through due to her disorder.
Mary does not find any means of talking to her family members about her anxiety, which leaves her to struggle with the problem alone. Mary feels that her family shadows her, and thus she cannot share her worries with any of her family members. Though her sister and father continue to pressure her in her education, Mary gets more anxious about developing an attack in the classroom. Due to Mary’s pressure to continue with her studies, she decides to fake that she attends her classes while the reality is that she spends her time in her friend’s place.