I was not-quite-nine when I had my first full-blown panic attack. We were on a family vacation in Montenegro, where we went every summer, and it happened at night; I don’t remember what triggered it. I do remember being rushed to a hospital—the kind of bleak Communist-era institution that most Americans would likely associate more with horror movies than routine medical care—by my parents, who were understandably very freaked out by their kid’s racing heart, shaky legs, and sudden inability to breathe properly.

To really level up the experience, the pediatric specialists in situ had clearly never previously witnessed (or recognized) a child having a panic attack. They administered an ECG, tranquilizers, and cardiac medicine, to prevent what seemed to them like the possibility of an imminent heart attack (… in an otherwise perfectly healthy nine-year-old).