In July 2003, during his commute between Brixton and the South Bank, Mike McNally tried to climb out of a tube carriage while it was moving. Other passengers held him back until the next platform. He had been living with worsening anxiety and claustrophobia for roughly a decade by then, and the attack was the moment the problem stopped being deniable. That account, in the Guardian’s “A moment that changed me” series, is worth reading as a case study in what panic disorder actually looks like: not nervousness, but a fear of being trapped that escalates until the body tries to solve the problem by leaving, at speed, through a door that will not open.
The following year his GP referred him to a hypnotherapist. After three months of regression sessions, the therapist asked him a strange question — had he ever been in a train crash? He said he would have remembered. He checked with his parents anyway. They looked at each other and told him that on 4 September 1965, aged four, returning with his grandmother from a summer in Ireland by ferry and then train, he had been aboard a carriage that another train struck as it stood at the platform. The carriage was lifted off its framework with the passengers inside. His grandmother and he were unharmed; other passengers were seriously injured. His parents had tried to talk to him about it afterwards, but he screamed and ran away, so they stopped.
What the story claims
McNally’s account of the aftermath is that the conversation changed everything. A decade of fear suddenly had a source: every situation in which he felt trapped was, in his telling, a return to that carriage. He says he worked with the therapist on tools for it, and the essay closes on evidence of the change — a 2006 work trip to Whistler, where the only way up was a 30-minute cable car ride he expected to abandon halfway, and which he rode to the top instead. He now travels London by tube to concerts with his 14-year-old daughter, which he presents as the life the discovery gave him.
The part that is genuinely unsettled
This is the terrain of the recovered-memory debate, and it is worth being precise about where the doubt sits. The memory itself is not implausible on its face: children retain some episodic memories from around age four, and the event was dramatic and corroborated by his parents, whose confirmation is real evidence that something happened. What the essay assumes is the further step — that an unremembered trauma was operating for a decade as the hidden cause of the phobias, and that hypnotic regression located it.
That step is where memory researchers have long been cautious. Hypnosis does not function as a retrieval technology; studies suggest it raises a person’s confidence in what they recall more reliably than it improves accuracy, and material produced under it is more open to the therapist’s framing. The 1990s “memory wars” produced a generation of cases in which plausible, emotionally coherent memories surfaced in therapy and later proved false, and the professional guidance that followed amounts to: recovered memories may be true or false, and the confidence with which they arrive is not a guide to which.
There is also a simpler reading of the recovery that the essay does not consider. Graded exposure — the repeated, deliberate confrontation with the feared situation until the fear extinguishes — is the treatment for panic disorder and agoraphobia with the strongest evidence behind it. A man who, in the course of therapy, repeatedly boards trains and rides a cable car to its summit is doing in-vivo exposure, whatever else the sessions were about. The relief is real. Attributing it to the excavated memory is a story laid over the top.
None of which is an argument that McNally was not helped, or that the panic was not real. His own bottom line — that he could stop feeling terrified all the time, and that this made him a father he wanted to be — is not in dispute. It is a reminder that a good origin story and a verified one are different things, and that sometimes the useful part of therapy is the part you can measure.