Stigmatization, as a fear of something unknown, of difereneces from the majority, is nowdays an important theme to discussion in the psychiatry. The labelling of the patients is known not only in the laic, common population, but unfortunatelly also in the psychiatric community. The people with neurotic symptoms are mostly affected with autostereotypes, what means they are afraid of psychiatric labelling. This leads to denying of psychic problems and symptoms, searching for somatic explain and to inadequate or late treatment. Sometimes even the fact of ”psychiatric disorder“ is understood as a synonym to be ”a fool“ so the patients tend to see a somatic specialist or are waiting till they get over the symptoms. Also the relatives are afraid of stigmatization for the whole family and minimize or neglect the symptoms. A somatic explanation is better tolerated and triggers sympathy and protection.. Only a small part of patients with panic disorder gets to a specialist.

We have studied the documentation of patients in Psychiatric centre Prague with panic disorder and agoraphobia. By using the linear regresion we have found, that the education of the patients can have an influence on the start of adequate treatment - the higher the education was, the later the treatment starts. We also searched the severity of the symptoms before and after the treatment, to find out the influence of the lag and stigmatization on the treatment efficacy.