My first long-term therapist that I saw from age 12-14 was convinced I had "panic attacks" and needed some kind of rescue med. What never added up to me about it was that the onset usually felt so much more gradual than I understood actual panic attacks to be and I never felt any kind of sense of impending doom or fear beyond maybe not knowing if I was coming down with something or not. The way I self-harmed also wasn’t quite adding up with what I read about “doing it just to feel something”, “a cry for help”, and “punishing yourself”. I even had a hard time accepting what it really was because my understanding of meltdowns was aggressive little children going into a blind rage and throwing chairs while causing whole classrooms to be evacuated at a moment's notice. We need to focus way more on the underlying internal experience rather than narrow, anecdotal checklists of behaviors.