Panic Diaries: A Genealogy of Panic Disorder

by Jackie Orr

Part cultural history, part sociological critique, and part literary performance, Panic Diaries explores the technological and social construction of individual and collective panic. Jackie Orr looks at instances of panic and its “cures” in the twentieth-century United from the mass hysteria following the 1938 radio broadcast of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds to an individual woman swallowing a pill to control the “panic disorder” officially recognized by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980. Against a backdrop of Cold War anxieties over atomic attack, Orr highlights the entanglements of knowledge and power in efforts to reconceive panic and its prevention as problems in communication and information feedback. Throughout, she reveals the shifting techniques of power and social engineering underlying the ways that scientific and social scientific discourses—including crowd psychology, Cold War cybernetics, and contemporary psychiatry—have rendered panic an object of technoscientific management. Orr, who has experienced panic attacks herself, kept a diary of her participation as a research subject in clinical trials for the Upjohn Company’s anti-anxiety drug Xanax. This “panic diary” grounds her study and suggests the complexity of her desire to track the diffusion and regulation of panic in U.S. society. Orr’s historical research, theoretical reflections, and biographical narrative combine in this remarkable and compelling genealogy, which documents the manipulation of panic by the media, the social sciences and psychiatry, the U.S. military and government, and transnational drug companies.

Genres: Mental Health, Psychology, Nonfiction, Grad School

376 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2005

Reviews

[Nigel R. · Rating 1 out of 5]

Jackie Orr’s Panic Diaries: A Genealogy of Panic Disorder attempts to blend critical theory, personal narrative, and historical analysis into a study of how panic disorder has been constructed in modern society. However, while the book’s ambitions are commendable, its execution leaves much to be desired.

One of the primary issues with Panic Diaries is its dense and often inaccessible prose. Orr leans heavily on poststructuralist jargon, making the text feel more like an exercise in academic obscurantism than a clear and insightful analysis. While readers familiar with Foucault, Deleuze, and feminist theory may appreciate the theoretical depth, others may find themselves lost in convoluted sentences and excessive theorization that add little to the book’s core arguments.

Furthermore, Orr’s reliance on performative writing—blurring the lines between analysis, memoir, and experimental storytelling—feels more self-indulgent than illuminating. Rather than offering a structured, evidence-based examination of panic disorder’s history and cultural framing, the book often meanders into abstract, fragmented musings that do little to clarify the subject matter. This stylistic choice weakens the book’s argumentative strength, making it difficult for readers to extract concrete insights about the medicalization of panic disorder or its sociopolitical implications.

Additionally, Panic Diaries fails to engage with the lived experiences of individuals with panic disorder in a meaningful way. While Orr touches on her own experiences and critiques psychiatric institutions, she does so in a way that feels more theoretical than empathetic. The book’s abstract focus on power structures and discourses largely ignores the voices of those who actually suffer from panic disorder, making it feel disconnected from the realities of those navigating the condition in everyday life.

In the end, Panic Diaries is a book that may appeal to a niche audience of critical theorists and academic scholars, but for general readers—or even those specifically interested in the history and social construction of panic disorder—it is frustratingly opaque, overwritten, and lacking in clear, practical insights. Those seeking a more accessible and nuanced discussion of anxiety and panic disorder would be better served by other works in the field.

[el · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Psychopower is a form of rationality that wants to mimic as well as manage what it will name the 'irrational' or the unconscious, taking on the figure of madness, by turns, as its radical 'other' and its intimate familiar." (14)

"What the criteria-specific approach to classifying mental disorders really accomplishes, writes Millon, is 'a significant conceptual step toward a future goal' when criteria of 'appropriate specificity and breadth' will offer reliable and valid indices for identifying psychiatric syndromes. As a step toward a future empiricity, the DSM-III does not name 'tangible entities' but rather 'conceptual prototypes'—a paradigm shift away from the notion of disease 'entity' and toward a 'prototypical' diagnostic model...Each disorder becomes, in a sense, a probabilistic model of that disorder. All the 'empirical,' criteria-specific syndromes named by the DSM-III are really operating, in Spitzer's words, as 'hypotheses to be tested.'" (240)

"From an objective measure of realness to a pragmatic measure of predictive utility, the validity of psychiatric diagnoses becomes abstracted from any reality principle at precisely the moment the diagnostic classification system turns insistently empirical." (242)

[Firdous Nizar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brilliant piece of writing. The most non-academic academic book I've come across so far.

[emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a beautiful book about the culture of panic in the US, written by a very smart lady who takes Xanex for recurrent panic attacks. Part of the book is a history of the relationship between the US military and social psychology, which includes tracking social panic after Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio show, and trying to alleviate panic in the scariest way possible in 1950's era nuclear drills. The other part is the authors own experience volunteering for a clinical drug trial treating panic disorder. Compelling all around.

[Cathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spectacular interweaving of personal experience, history, and politics. Found the first chapter a little too pomo for my liking but stuck with it and learned lots of new and very scary stuff. What's not to panic about?