Men, Masculinities and Constructions of Self in Panic Discourse

Even while they advocate for qualitative, interpretive approaches to understanding panic disorder, sociologists and feminist geographers have taken the statistics on it at face value, conducting research with women because panic has been reported to be a gender-specific problem. We still lack a sociology that effectively considers men's experience of panic. Accordingly, we use data from in-depth interviews, conducted with 22 Canadian women and men who self-identify as suffering from “Panic Disorder with Agoraphobia,” to explore how women and men employ panic to communicate, construct, manage and resist a particular kinds of gendered identity. We find that women and men's understandings of their experiences with panic involve gendered feeling rules (Hochschild, 1979) that are reinforced through the medically-institutionalised claim that panic is a “woman's problem.”