How to get treatment for Agoraphobia

Your panic disorder has become so bad, your “boundaries” of where you can go have become smaller and smaller, until you find yourself stuck, not leaving your home. You are unable to go to the grocery store or anywhere! You find yourself depressed and at the same time comfortable not leaving.

It’s a scary place, and seems no one really understands. Let me share with you treatment for Agoraphobia.

Difficulty: Challenging

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Patience
• hope
• baby steps

1. 
    
   Treatment of Aoraphobia, you are not alone

   Understand “You are not alone!” “You are not crazy!” There are many people that suffer with agoraphobia as you do. There is treatment and help for agoraphobia.

2. 
    
   Treatment for Agoraphobia, understand Agoraphobia

   Search the internet to see if there are any doctors that will come to your home. If that is not possible, there are still many ways to start helping you heal. The internet has so much information, read and read, learn all you can to understand what you are going through. Listen to other people's stories, if JUST ONE idea helps you, wonderful!!

3. 
    
   Treatment for Agoraphobia, join support groups

   Join chat room support groups! It is therapy in itself. Sometimes just realizing you are not alone and to hear others have recovered from Agoraphobia, is help in itself!

4. 
    
   Agoraphobia treatment, water as an aid

   Take small steps towards recovery! Baby steps! Never leave home without a couple bottles of water. (Usually your choice to not leave, is due to the fear of a panic attack.) If you have a level 10 panic attack, drinking water fast, will return “Breathing back to normal.” With the attack comes hyper ventilating, whether you realize it or not. It’s shallow breathing which starts feeding the attack. The water will serve as a tool, to diffuse any panic attack, if it doesn't get rid of the attack completely, it will atleast lower the attack down to a manageable state.

5. 
    
   Agoraphobia treatment- keep progressing!

   Try going around the block, start expanding your boundaries! If you cant even go around your block, try that. It may be hard the first time. But do it over and over for a week, or 2 weeks whatever, until it’s no big deal. Then slowly broaden your horizon. A Bit farther each time. Panicking becomes a learned behavior, you panic at the thought of leaving the home, try to slowly unlearn that. You will see you can drive around the block soon with no panic, and now you have retrained your brain. Just try to keep taking baby steps ahead.

[edieness]

on 6/23/2009 Great tips on How to Recover from Agoraphobia.

[MichaelJMotta]

on 6/22/2009 Good topic GM! I was diagnosed with panic disorder (agoraphobia-related) sometime in the early 90s and suffered from it for over a decade. I haven't had a full-blown panic attack in five years or so, but I still suffer from depression. I found alprazolam, a.k.a. ****, good for stemming panic attacks. Email me if you ever want to talk about it :)