It's the wise decision to leave mental health diagnosis for professionals.
Like with any other illness Anxiety and Panic Disorders diagnosis starts at your doctor’s office. To find out if you have any metal health problems your doctor will start asking different questions to get the right idea about your symptoms and if they can be related to Anxiety or Panic disorders.
Be ready to answer different questions from your medical history and maybe even perform some physical anxiety symptom checks, since this will give your doctor a clear picture what might be wrong with you (given there is something wrong.)
Not many people know this, but there are no laboratory tests to diagnose anxiety disorders and panic disorders, thus your doctor will use different tests. And it is more than likely that you will have to perform not one, and not two different tests, but a series of those. Some of people are surprised by that, but like mentioned above, it is impossible to predict if you have any mental health issues with laboratory tests, the only way to do this is by asking questions and performing different tests.
Furthermore, by giving you a number of tests your doctor is making sure that there is nothing else that might be causing a problem, and that the reason for your problems is Anxiety or Panic disorder.
Depending on which one you will choose, psychiatrists and psychologists will use tests that were specially designed to assess your mental illness. These include different Question and Answer sessions, observing your anxiety behavior and hearing your story how a certain symptom is causing you trouble in your social life. Only then, after conducting a series of tests and hours of questioning, your doctor will compare your symptoms with the ones that are associated with Anxiety and Panic disorder.
Even though a lot of people are looking for some kind of a “Home-Kit” that will help them to predict if they are suffering from anxiety and/or panic disorder I would not recommend that.
Why? Well, mostly because it takes more than just few answers to few questions to accurately diagnose your mental health issue. It is very easy to make a mistake and start thinking that you actually have a mental health problem which you actually do not. But like with so many things in life, only thinking that you are anxiety and panic disorder sufferer will become a self fulfilling prophecy.
So once again, leave mental health diagnosis for professionals.
