Articles: Agoraphobia...The illness that imprisons its victims

He is a man with a crusade.  Having lost eight years of his life, gone to the outer limits and back, he is now ready to tell millions of others enduring the same affliction that there IS hope.

There is a name for it:  agoraphobia.  And it can be cured.

Jim Neidert, 38 is 5'11", the picture of health.  Even during his sickness he did not show outwards signs.  It was all on the inside making it even more difficult for others to accept that there was really anything wrong with this strapping man.

Agoraphobia has been described in different ways.  It is panic on traveling alone away from the safety of home and on being in crowded places.  Technically it is fear of the marketplace, or fear of open spaces.  Those who suffer from it know that it is really a fear of fear itself and how that fear will materialize in public.

One psychotherapist defines it as:

"a learned condition in which the person has developed avoidance behavior patterns (usually multiple) because of an underlying or basic fear of becoming out of control, going crazy, painfully embarrassing himself or herself, and/or having a stroke or heart attack or dying."

Jim Neidert's eight-year nightmare began in 1970, when he was 25 years old, married with two small children.  As the anxiety attacks grew worse he found he was unable to go to a restaurant, to the grocery store, the bank, barber, family gatherings, and finally, even to work.

Unable to leave the safety of his own home, he began to doubt his own sanity. Although he lost thousands of dollars and searched desperately for a cure, seeing several doctors, two psychiatrists, chiropractors, faith healers and a hypnotist, he could not find the answers he needed for recovery...

...He remembers well October 1970.  Jim had just quit his job as parts manager at a car dealership in order to start a new career as an insurance adjuster, a job opening for which he had awaited anxiously for the past year.

Planning to buy some new suits the week before starting his new job he set out, stopping on the way to say goodbye to a friend at another dealership.

"Suddenly, without warning, while I was just standing still my heat started racing and I was short of breath.  The fellow I was talking to couldn't tell anything was wrong, but there sure was."

He left quickly, blamed the incident on the cigarette he was smoking and put it out.  Feeling better in the fresh air, he drove to the clothing store and as he was getting out of the car his heart started racing again.

I was alarmed, frightened and bewildered, wondering what's happening to me?"

It was a question he would ask again and again over the next eight years.  The vicious cycle had begun.

This time he decided it was the excitement of his new job, and went home to sleep, feeling a nap would solve the problem.

"But the next morning when I went down to the local restaurant for breakfast, as usual, and ordered bacon and eggs a new feeling came over me as I was waiting for my order—panic.  I left money to cover the bill, told the waitress I had to go, and left.  Outside I felt better, but completely bewildered."

Reporting for his new work on Monday morning he experienced sweating hands, racing heart, lump in the throat and knots in his stomach.  At lunch when his supervisor ordered the special Jim settled for a hamburger explaining he wasn't feeling right.  Confiding that he too had been nervous when he started with the company, Jim's boss assured him it would "go away."

But just the opposite happened. It got worse day after day with relief only at the day's end.

"Every waking moment was spent in introspection.  What was happening to me?  Couldn't I cope with the pressures and prestige of being an insurance adjuster?"

"I'd always been in good health, was used to working seven days a week, and beside, at 25 what could go wrong?  I decided it just couldn't be the job, which I liked and was doing well in.  Our marriage was sound and happy; my wife had stayed home raising our two healthy children.. We didn't have any bills.  Was some subconscious 'thing' causing this?

Deciding it must be a physical problem Jim saw a doctor.  He was told he had a fast pulse and normal blood pressure and advised to cut down on smoking and quit coffee.

"He didn't tell me what I needed and wanted so desperately to hear.  What was happening to me, why did I feel that way?  So I left without any answers and became even more puzzled."

"That's what always puzzled my wife too, every time I would try to explain how I felt."  "But you don't look sick," she would say to me.  It's so hard for the spouse, if not impossible, to understand what's happening."

When he first started reading books about nerves his wife thought he was reading about symptoms and then looking for them and they would happen.  "We always used to go out, " she said, "and he didn't want to go out any more, even if there was a wedding in the family or something.  I love to be with people and around people and all of a sudden if people came to our house Jim would hide or if we were eating he'd never finish his supper even after they left."

Jim agreed, "I'd gag on the food.  As for going out—there's no way I could have walked across a gymnasium floor with people in there.  I would've had to have support, would have been dizzy.

"I'd go out at night and walk around the block after dark because I couldn't do it in the daytime for fear someone would stop and talk and I'd be trapped.

"Trapped...When an agoraphobic drives a car he's not trapped but when he's a passenger he is.  In a restaurant he's trapped when the food comes because then he has to stay there and eat it.  I couldn't go to the dentist; standing in line at the bank was impossible.  If you go to the grocery store once you're at the checkout you're trapped.

Symptoms suffered by the agoraphobic are varied: rapid heart beat along with heart palpitations, skipped or uneven heart beats which feels like the heart flip-flops, chest pains, sweaty or cold hands or feet, pins and needles in hands or feet, an iron band around the head, churning or knots in stomach, dry mouth, difficulty breathing where you think you're not going to get enough air.  A victim may have one or several or all.

Several years after Jim got sick his wife began working to buy extra things for their new home.  It was a job she had to keep for many years, one that as his illness progressed turned out to be a necessity from a financial standpoint.

"Sometimes I would cry all the way to work and cry all the way home," she said, "because I couldn't let anybody at work know that I had any problems and didn't want Jim to know how I felt so I'd be happy both places and crying in between."

Looking at his wife, Jim said, "I think it's important to know that she's special.  I think it would be most hard for anybody to even continue a marriage in that condition.  One of the hardest things is to go to work, leave your problems at home, then come home from work and face them again.  It was pretty hard for her not to get onto me.  She dealt with it all on her own."

"I kept it all inside.  I prayed a lot.  I was constantly making excuses for him to friends, relatives, or at work like why he wouldn't come to things like our Christmas party.

I came home from work one day and the phone was ringing when I came in.  By that time Jim had quit the insurance company and was working for his dad at the garage as a mechanic and they told me over the phone to come down that Jim was having a heart attack.

He was lying in the seat of the truck he'd been working on and he wanted a doctor to come but the doctor said to bring him to the hospital in an ambulance.  But he was afraid to move so I took him in the truck and in the emergency room they hooked him up to an EKG machine.

The doctor took me aside and told me we were lucky we got him there in time, he was sure Jim was having a massive heart attack.  It scared me to death.  His pulse rate was 180, heart palpitating, fluttering so you could see it through his shirt.  The doctor said 'the next time he might not make it to the hospital.'

I was standing by Jim and holding his hand and all of a sudden his heart went back to normal, one hour after he got there.  The doctor wanted to keep him overnight.  He couldn't understand it.  The EKG showed no heart damage.  He didn't know what in the world happened.  He let Jim go home the next day."

While the doctor was puzzled by Jim's condition, the situation is all too recognizable to the agoraphobia victim who suffers these symptoms.  His was in fact; Jim's third such occurrence, each one becoming progressively worse...

...A couple years passed and I was getting deeper in this thing.  It ended up I said "That's it!  I am going to admit myself to a psychiatric ward."

He went for 30 days, coming home weekends.  His wife was against the idea.

"I've seen people in mental wards and you know they're mental and I said, that's not Jim.  To look at him, there seemed to be nothing wrong with him.  And, I was sure whatever it was--it wasn't that.  I'd go after work and on weekends and would cry all the way home again."

"She's got a new Corvette coming for being such a sweetheart," Jim said, giving her a gentle look.

It took awhile, but I finally fulfilled my promise in 1995.

"The psychiatrist kept telling me ‘There's got to be something wrong in your life' and I said, ‘There isn't.'  then he kept telling me "You've got to let your anger out; you've got to have anger." I said I didn't have any."

"After I left his care he wanted me to continue and I didn't because we were going nowhere.  I'm glad I did admit myself to the ward though, because now I won't recommend it to other agoraphobics."

"I finally quit my job and started doing things from my basement to earn a living so I wouldn't have to go out.  I had a good friend, one of the country's best bakers, who taught me baking after I got sick.  So I got into baking; baked at home and sold to the public, and delivered to the local grocery store and restaurant.  It was hard once I was in the stores because I felt trapped until I'd filled the racks, but it would only last the five minutes I was there and once I was out the door I was okay again.

"I would always feel sensitized.  Like when a car cuts in front of you and your adrenalin flows.  In a sensitized body the adrenalin flows all the time.

...A nervous breakdown isn't what people think...It is better described as 'a major interruption in the body's efficient functioning as a result of emotional and mental fatigue brought on and maintained by stress, mainly by fear....A continuous state of fear, whatever the cause, gradually stimulates the adrenalin – releasing nerves to produce a set pattern of disturbing sensations...I would say that it is at this moment when the sufferer becomes afraid of the alarming, strange sensations produced by continuous fear and tension and so places himself or herself in the circle of fear-adrenalin-fear.  Fear is what triggers this thing."

To too many people "nervous breakdown" denotes peculiar irrational behavior with a need to be institutionalized.  But to Jim, the definition above definition struck a note.  As he began to think back to when his problems began, he concluded he had indeed had a nervous breakdown. 

"In my particular case the fear resulted from back trouble.  In 1969 a chiropractor diagnosed my scoliosis, which is treatable when you are younger but for me it was too late.  He would try to relieve the pain but could not straighten the spine and correct the condition."

"You'll just have to live with it, he told me and if the pain gets too bad you'll have to have surgery and be laid up from one to two years.  Eventually, he said, I'd be in a wheel chair.

"I guess my mind ran wild with fear although I didn't realize it at the time.  I left his office feeling the same way I came in except for one thing; now I had something to worry about.  What if he couldn't relieve the pain?  What if I had to have surgery?  How could I support my family if I couldn't work?  I visualized myself being flat on my back without any income coming in."

Because the pain was there, I was going twice a week, and lying in a tub soaking, continually thinking about it.  One day it snapped my nervous system, which said that's it, and strange feelings began to happen and it hit like a ton of bricks.

First, it was the sensations when saying goodbye to my friend at the dealership, then the restaurant experience, and on through several mock heart attacks, each one giving him something else to fear and worry about.

"I'd gotten trapped in the fear-adrenalin-fear cycle and didn't know it.  Oh, if only I'd been told that in the beginning.  The only thing I ever wanted to know was What's happening to me and why do I feel this way?  I wouldn't have had to suffer all those 'Oh my goodness' here it comes again' or all those 'what ifs' which only made my condition worse."

All through his illness Jim kept questioning:  What's causing this?  How do I get out of it? Why aren't I the person I used to be?

"I went from doctor to clinic to you name it … hypnotist, faith healers.  There was not the slightest amount of cure from any of the doctors or clinics, drugs will not conquer this."

He found the answers!  ..."Day and night and with strong determination I decided that this is going to work.  I read and practiced those methods, forcing myself to go out and do things I hadn't done for years, whatever I had avoided doing in the past.  In the past I would run from it, but now I was facing it.

Small victories, the first time I went to...a Friday night fish fry with my family I was sweating but I went through it. I had a full meal.   I think back to the early part of my illness when I would go to company gatherings where everyone else was eating steak and I would order a hamburger and even choke on that.

Jim has always been a perfectionist.  He likes snowmobiling, flying, and has always enjoyed people...He owned a 120 Cessna and was taking lessons to get his private license when he became ill.

"All that had to be abandoned and I sold the plane because of my nerves.  I couldn't stand being ‘trapped' in the plane."

"When I went out and bought another airplane I realized the long battle was over."

Jim took lessons in his 2nd airplane, Citabria, and now has his license.

"I just want to tell people what happened and how I recovered and where they can the same kind of help.

Once a sufferer hears themselves described for the first time a light bulb lights up; instant relief.  There is a name for this thing they've got, and there's a cure for it.

He is concerned about nervously ill victims who spend thousands of insurance dollars going to psychiatrists and therapists trying to find out what caused their illness.

"The person suffering from agoraphobia doesn't know what caused it and it's not necessary for them to know..."

Agoraphobia probably affects more women than men and is more easily covered up by them since they can sometimes stay at home but the man who has it and can't work can't cover it up.  He is afraid of what is going to happen next, and afraid it will happen in front of people.  They can't see it because it's all inside, but it's so real to the sufferer.  And it is kept alive by adding fear all the time.  Latest estimates report that there are 30 million people suffering from nervous illness in America alone, and it's a worldwide thing.  Fear is fear!

In spite of all he has been through, Jim doesn't regret what has happened in his life.

"I believe the weak come out stronger..."

If we needed any proof as to Jim's recovery seeing him wolf down a big breakfast at an area restaurant and then walk the busy downtown streets and shop in the stores provided that proof.

We asked his wife if she had any further comments.  She just looked at Jim with stars in her eyes and let him answer for her.  "How about—It's good to have him back?"