Anxiety Behind the Wheel: More common and problematic than you might think.

Anxiety behind the Wheel: More common and problematic than you might think.

I was a freshly-licensed driver – two or three months out on the road by myself – when I got into my first accident. It was a fender bender, nobody was hurt, thankfully, and it wasn’t even my fault, but despite how easily everybody drove away from the accident, it still shook me to the core.

I spent the next couple of weeks thinking about accidents; the minor scrapes and bruises accrued on the family Subaru, the time my dad, in his new car, got rear-ended by a semi-truck, and I was amazed at how lucky my family and I have been on the road. My parents are both very careful drivers, and they instilled that caution in me as they taught me how to handle a car, no matter how nerve-wracking it was to see my mother gasp and step on the imaginary brakes whenever she thought I wasn’t slowing down fast enough.

Driving to school the next morning was eye-opening. I was always aware of the other cars on the road, you have to be, of course, but now I was looking at them differently. Is that red Volvo swerving slightly accidentally, or is the driver fighting off sleep? Did the van in front of me miss that stop sign because the driver was texting? Driving, which I used to love, suddenly became terrifying, and my anxiety jumped at the chance to blow a whole new set of harmless scenarios into road disasters of nightmarish proportions.

It’s been a little over a year now since my first (and hopefully last) accident, and while I have rekindled my love of driving and adjusted my anxiety medication, I have a newfound and deep respect for the driving instructors and road test administrators of the world. Humans are inherently flawed, and will most definitely get distracted one way or another, so it takes a great deal of courage to get in the passenger’s seat with a scared teenager at the wheel. Having only stepped foot in a DMV four times in my life, I am certainly not one to critique the criteria to become a licensed driver, but having been one of those scared teenagers only a year ago, I do think I could offer some suggestions.

A lot of people, myself included, have the tendency to crumble under pressure- probably more people than would like to admit it. While succumbing to pressure and anxiety generally only affects the person affected by that pressure and anxiety, a panic attack while driving down an interstate at rush hour could have painful consequences for many more people.

The United States has taken a lot of action to cut down on the number of accidents caused by drunk and distracted drivers, but why hasn’t anybody done anything about the anxious drivers? The lack of dialogue in this country about mental health is hurting people in more ways than one, and so it should be factored into the testing and licensing of prospective drivers.

As with most other problems in this country, the best solution to this one is education. If we educated driving instructors and test administrators on the symptoms of anxiety and panic attacks, they would be better equipped to deal with an anxious learner, and could help new drivers calm down and continue safely. Anxiety and panic cause adrenaline to cloud people’s judgment, which can lead to dangerous decisions behind the wheel that they would never make otherwise. A simple intersection can turn into a myriad of deadly ‘what if’s’ for people with severe and untreated anxiety.

Another way to help people with anxiety have an easier time behind the wheel would be to make therapy and therapeutic medications free, but of course, that is a little beyond the DMV’s realm of jurisdiction.

I sincerely hope that I will live to see a world where people are less afraid to share how they are actually feeling, and mental health issues are treated as seriously as physical health issues, instead of demonized and kept quiet. I am well aware that we as a society have a long ways to go in order to get there, but I believe that finding ways to make getting a driver’s license easier for the neurodiverse would be a huge step forward to opening up a national dialogue about mental health, as well as help decrease the number of car accidents by a significant amount.