This is my first post here, but I'll give a bit of a background on who I am and what has been going on as of late.

I've been diagnosed with depression for about 1/3 of my life. I'm 25 now. I've been off and on meds but am currently off and struggling. That's another bag of beans that I need to deal with here in the future.

Through the last 7-8 years I've had a lot of trouble with anxiety attacks, mostly brought on by stress in my life. Workload, things such as that will trigger an event. Over times past I have been able to concentrate on what was happening, hearing my heartbeat in my ears, calm my breathing and slowing it down to a very normal inhale/exhale.

My problem lies here. Over the last couple weeks my life has become turned upside down and my panic attacks have come with alarming frequency. I'd been used to 3-4 per week, but now I'm having 5-8 per day and the symptoms have become worse. The shaking of my body makes me unable to drive my car, so when I sense a panic attack coming on I have to pull to the side of the road if I'm unable to curb it immediately. The most alarming thing that has happened, and only over the last 48 hours is an extreme inability to breathe. Gasping for breath has become common for me, but to this degree is scary. I was luckily with someone during my first large panic attack like this, as I could not control my body. I was shaking, couldn't really understand what was going on around me, and was gasping for breath every possible second. This had caused me to become very dizzy to the point of losing conciousness. I had someone there that was rubbing my chest and helping me calm down though. The ideas of what could have possibly happened due to something massive like this is frightening, hence my coming to ask for help in understanding what would cause something such as this.