It would seem to me that, as we gain experience and go through some minor glitches on dives, we should increase our capacity to tolerate issues underwater. I'm wondering what could cause an experienced (say, more than 200 lifetime dives) diver to become distressed enough to lose rational thought. Has anyone here (who meets those criteria) been through a panic event? What caused it, and what did you do?
Question Panic in the experienced diver?
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It may be true, but it's somewhat irrelevant. You won't know that you're that person until it's too late, and the vast majority of people are better off thinking of themselves as potentially prone to panic. People tend to over-estimate their abilities, particularly in this domain. Moreover, the truly skilled person who is "immune" to panic may have become that way through being thoughtful about their own limitations, and one of those limitations is acknowledging that you have to manage your own brain sometimes.
I disagree with your first statement and whole heartily agree with the second. I don't think anything I wrote is BS, but I will agree with you that while I haven't paicked, I certainly could meet a situation that would cause me too. I just haven't experienced one, and I spend a lot of time figuring out ways to avoid problems and situations that might cause me to. I also both train and play "what-if" games so that I can do all the common tasks, and a good portion of self rescue ones without thinking about it. I also stand by my criticism of the diver I spoke about in my post. He is a fellow dive professional, we were in relatively benign environment, and he was a danger to himself and me. I have a very different set of expectations for someone on a DSD then I do for someone who may be responsible for the lives of others. If someone is relying on you as a dive professional and you are not completely comfortable in the water then I'm sure as hell not diving with you, and I don't think you should be diving in a pro capacity.
You're certainly entitled to your views, both of diving and my post, but I wanted to provide some back ground on how I developed these views.
Michael
Originally Posted by pelagic_by_nature
Great thread. I wanted to comment on something I heard in several posts though, and that is that everyone has a panic threshold. I doubt this is true for everyone. I imagine there are folks out there so cool and confident, that in a situation that would induce panic in just about everyone else, say for instance, OOA and severely entangled, They could continue to try to work through their predicament without panic right to the very end.
No one is born cool and confident enough to deal with an out of air while being severely entangled situation. There are certain professions that require that you train really hard to overcome the intense panic that a situation like that would instinctively create.
But it requires intense training, both physical and mental. This kind of training is hard to explain to anyone who has not been through it. The simulation of a drowning experience can be harrowing, and many people break down mentally while trying to overcome the primal panic that sets in. It does not matter that in the simulation, you have divers standing by to intervene, your brain is torn between your intense need to succeed, and its basic desire to avoid death.
Great thread. I wanted to comment on something I heard in several posts though, and that is that everyone has a panic threshold. I doubt this is true for everyone. I imagine there are folks out there so cool and confident, that in a situation that would induce panic in just about everyone else, say for instance, OOA and severely entangled, They could continue to try to work through their predicament without panic right to the very end.
No one is born cool and confident enough to deal with an out of air while being severely entangled situation. There are certain professions that require that you train really hard to overcome the intense panic that a situation like that would instinctively create.
But it requires intense training, both physical and mental. This kind of training is hard to explain to anyone who has not been through it. The simulation of a drowning experience can be harrowing, and many people break down mentally while trying to overcome the primal panic that sets in. It does not matter that in the simulation, you have divers standing by to intervene, your brain is torn between your intense need to succeed, and its basic desire to avoid death.
DaleC
Contributor
Hmm.
Do we reduce or increase our panic potential by always insisting upon optimal equipment/conditions? Conventional wisdom would say those choices ought to make one safer but do they inadvertently also erode the development of practical problem solving skills? Does instilling in ones psyche the notion that this is all "very critical life support equipment that cannot be alllowed to fail" set up a panic response in some when that equipment/conditions do fail?
Perhaps I'm full of beans on this one (wouldn't be the first time) but I can't help thinking that successfully meeting challenging situations breeds resourcefulness and that always structuring dives to be "optimal" removes the opportunity for the average diver to develop it.
Instead, by using optimal equipment divers seek to challenge themselves by engaging in progressively more committed diving; cave, deep, wreck, ice. Then, at some point a breakdown in equipment/conditions may occur and the diver, lacking the experience of being resourceful gained by coping with prior sub optimal conditions, finds themselves way in over their heads and panic sets in.
Do we reduce or increase our panic potential by always insisting upon optimal equipment/conditions? Conventional wisdom would say those choices ought to make one safer but do they inadvertently also erode the development of practical problem solving skills? Does instilling in ones psyche the notion that this is all "very critical life support equipment that cannot be alllowed to fail" set up a panic response in some when that equipment/conditions do fail?
Perhaps I'm full of beans on this one (wouldn't be the first time) but I can't help thinking that successfully meeting challenging situations breeds resourcefulness and that always structuring dives to be "optimal" removes the opportunity for the average diver to develop it.
Instead, by using optimal equipment divers seek to challenge themselves by engaging in progressively more committed diving; cave, deep, wreck, ice. Then, at some point a breakdown in equipment/conditions may occur and the diver, lacking the experience of being resourceful gained by coping with prior sub optimal conditions, finds themselves way in over their heads and panic sets in.
It's surely essential for training to include all likely failure scenarios and quite a few that are less likely. And I don't mean simulated - the student should face these situations for real. Unlike what may happen later he will have people there to help him, but they should only intervene if he clearly can't cope. And these scenarios should be repeated time after time so the response becomes almost automatic. On the basis that in an emergency it's the poorly learned skills that are forgotten first, the aim is to drum these responses into the student so that whatever may happen to him later on, he'll know that he faced this problem for real in training and came out the other side. That is an enormous confidence booster and can make the difference between panicking and giving up, and rationally dealing with the issues and (hopefully) surviving.
That's the way I was trained and that's the way I train. It can take a long time and many dives, though exceptionally it needn't be. I simply don't believe in training courses which are constrained to a fixed number of dives, and especially when that number is small.
That's the way I was trained and that's the way I train. It can take a long time and many dives, though exceptionally it needn't be. I simply don't believe in training courses which are constrained to a fixed number of dives, and especially when that number is small.
seaducer
Contributor
I can not agree. I think things like panic are hardwired into our brains, perhaps at one point it was a survival tool, maybe it helped when the lions came...I don't know.
That eerily calm voice we hear on radio recordings of pilots talking about how they are going to die very soon in a plane crash is simply because they have been trained out the wazoo for that exact scenario.
Put that same cool cat, say Sullenburger who landed his plane in the Hudson a few years back, I am sure I or someone else could find out where his threshold is, I doubt it would be in a plane, but maybe underwater or in a building on fire...somewhere he will crack.
Being trained to think and react calmly in life threatening situations is a great tool, and one that can be applied outside of the specific training, it becomes part of your nature. However everyone has a breaking point, many just haven't reached it yet.
The Chairman
Chairman of the Board
Panic is an unreasonable reaction to a less than optimal situation.
People often try to reason through such an event, and it's an exercise in futility. They are trying to discern which straw broke the camel's back and miss the point that ALL the straw was responsible.
The purpose of fear is that of a fire alarm. It's there to tell you that you are in impending peril. Let's face it, if you are under water: you are!!! In fact, we have to suppress our fears and trepidations in order to dive. It shouldn't be surprising that at times, people fail at suppressing those fears when they are presented with feelings of impending doom. If no clear solution presents itself, then fear can devolve into panic and your ability to resolve the issues facing you drops to nil. It's at this point the brain can think of only one solution: escape! Of course, ascending too fast has it's own perils. But the unreasoning person has no ability to ponder those. They just want out!
Trying to calm a panicked person is hard in itself and human touch is a big factor. I have had to deal with a panicked diver twice and both times, it seemed that when I grabbed them, they were able to calm down considerably. Why? At this point in time, you have become the solution to all of their problems.
People often try to reason through such an event, and it's an exercise in futility. They are trying to discern which straw broke the camel's back and miss the point that ALL the straw was responsible.
The purpose of fear is that of a fire alarm. It's there to tell you that you are in impending peril. Let's face it, if you are under water: you are!!! In fact, we have to suppress our fears and trepidations in order to dive. It shouldn't be surprising that at times, people fail at suppressing those fears when they are presented with feelings of impending doom. If no clear solution presents itself, then fear can devolve into panic and your ability to resolve the issues facing you drops to nil. It's at this point the brain can think of only one solution: escape! Of course, ascending too fast has it's own perils. But the unreasoning person has no ability to ponder those. They just want out!
Trying to calm a panicked person is hard in itself and human touch is a big factor. I have had to deal with a panicked diver twice and both times, it seemed that when I grabbed them, they were able to calm down considerably. Why? At this point in time, you have become the solution to all of their problems.
am sure we all have a threshold at some point under some certain circumstances. All of our training and experience must to some degree raise that threshold well over a somebody who only dives a few times per year.
With the type of diving I do, I am not sure when I would face a panic situation, I carry redundant gas when solo diving, so equipment failure is unlikely, maybe something like drifting in the ocean having been left behind by a dive boat would, after some certain time, induce panic, I don't know, and am optimistic enough to believe at some point help would arrive. I have been in a situation where current swept me away from the dive site and was eventually picked up after 40 minutes or so ..... sometimes I wonder how long I would have lasted if the dive boat had not found me .... at what point would I panic.
With the type of diving I do, I am not sure when I would face a panic situation, I carry redundant gas when solo diving, so equipment failure is unlikely, maybe something like drifting in the ocean having been left behind by a dive boat would, after some certain time, induce panic, I don't know, and am optimistic enough to believe at some point help would arrive. I have been in a situation where current swept me away from the dive site and was eventually picked up after 40 minutes or so ..... sometimes I wonder how long I would have lasted if the dive boat had not found me .... at what point would I panic.
OP
I wonder, from my own experience, whether panic is something that happens early, or whether you can devolve into it . . . thinking about drifting with no boat, I would think that, if I were reasoning through things like using my signaling devices and getting positive, that I might become increasingly discouraged and frightened, but I'd be unlikely to panic, maybe because there is no action available that's going to change anything when one panics.
In both diving and in my work, the worst fear for me seems to be instant -- once I'm settled down to working out a solution, the fear retreats.
In both diving and in my work, the worst fear for me seems to be instant -- once I'm settled down to working out a solution, the fear retreats.
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