Current drug therapy for agoraphobia.

The hallmark of agoraphobia is the spontaneous panic attack, a reaction of extreme fearfulness and impending doom with cardiorespiratory symptoms. The end result can be a patient who is housebound. The basic therapeutic principle is confrontation with the avoided object or activity. Controlled clinical experiments demonstrate that both imipramine and phenelzine, the drugs of choice for this prevalent and disabling disorder, have a specific antipanic effect.