PANIC! A cultural historyPANIC! A cultural history
All In The Mind
From the collective paranoia of Cold War hysteria to the medicated, disordered mind - sociologist and performance artist Jackie Orr has penned a passionate and political history of panic. She delved into the rich archives of the war-time psyche, confronted her own panic attacks, and even enrolled in the clinical trial of a drug for panic disorder, in her quest to excavate our panicky past and present.
30:07•29 Dec 2007
Panic, Politics and Pills: Jackie Orr on Fear in the 20th Century
Episode Overview
- Panic disorder is framed as having no clear cause, which intensifies the frightening, "floating" sense of imminent death many people report.
- Cold War governments used drills, media and civil defence campaigns as a "mass theatre of fear" to heighten public anxiety about external threats.
- Psychiatry’s adoption of cybernetics encouraged viewing the mind as an information-processing system and drugs as tools to fix faulty circuits.
- The formal diagnosis of panic disorder in DSM-III is tied to drug research, where medications helped define and then treat the condition they highlighted.
- Jackie’s participation in a Xanax trial, while simulating symptoms, raises ethical questions about clinical research and the limits of so-called scientific objectivity in psychiatry.
“"It was an incredibly well-orchestrated, well-funded mass theatre of fear."”
Curious why panic feels so personal yet so political at the same time? This conversation on All In The Mind follows sociologist and performance artist Jackie Orr as she traces panic from Cold War bunkers to the psychiatrist’s office. You'll hear Jackie describe how her own "tremulous feeling that you're about to die" led to a diagnosis of panic disorder and a prescription for Xanax, along with the mix of relief and shame that label brought.
From there, she widens the lens, asking how a private terror became a named disorder – and a target for medication. The discussion ranges through eerie Cold War history, including mass civil defence drills and what Jackie calls a "well-orchestrated, well-funded mass theatre of fear". She argues that governments worked hard to turn citizens’ inner lives into a kind of psychological battleground, using fear of atomic attack – and later terrorism – to shape public emotion.
Things get especially striking when Jackie talks about psychiatry’s embrace of cybernetics, where the mind is treated as an "information processing device" and drugs as tools to correct faulty circuits. To put this to the test, she signed up for a clinical trial of Xanax after her own panic attacks had stopped, "simulating" panic through stories while taking the medication only when blood tests were due.
Her account of being both subject and observer in that trial exposes what she calls a "simulation of science" in contemporary psychiatry and raises tricky questions about ethics, diagnosis, and whose stories get to count as evidence. For anyone interested in anxiety, mental health treatment, or how politics reaches right into your nervous system, this episode offers a sharp, unsettling look at panic as more than a private problem.
How might your own ideas about fear and diagnosis shift after hearing it?
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