Panic Attack
harpersmagazine.substack.com
May 2 • 35M
Panic Attack
An author lucidly describes the experience—and the difficulty of understanding it as a teenager pre-internet
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Harper’s Magazine
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Internet culture has made different types of neurodivergence—particularly anxiety—more visible than it has ever been. Michael W. Clune, author of White Out, offers an account of how difficult it was to understand what a panic attack was before mental illness was instantly diagnosable with Dr. Google. More remarkably, his essay eloquently and accurately expresses what the experience of a panic attack is like. He speaks about the process of writing this memoir, discovering Oscar Wilde’s Salome, and creating types of narratives about anxiety.
Read Clune’s memoir, “The Anatomy of Panic”