De-Escalation
I get nervous enough when this happens to white, middle-aged me. What must it be like for a black or brown driver? Sometimes professionals make things worse. In January 1997, a month into my second marriage, I had a panic attack that lasted all night. My heart was racing, I was unable to sleep, and I had pain in one arm. I finally asked my new wife to take me to the emergency room in McMinnville. What followed was a 36-hour cascade of unintended consequences as doctors treated symptoms with drugs that caused other symptoms that had to be treated with more drugs until, finally, I had to be admitted for the night--something that had never happened to me before, nor since. In the end, I was fine physically; and in retrospect, I came to pin the incident on a growing awareness that this hurried rebound marriage had been a horrible mistake. And the whole thing could've been avoided if one of those doctors had taken a few minutes to interview me about my emotional state. The...