By Mark Walsh, The Dudley Chronicle

After years of being tortured by self-doubt and anxiety, Charles Linden's self-treatment method has already helped almost 70,000 fellow sufferers to conquer their fears and regain control of their lives.

MARK WALSH meets the man whose Internet empire is a by-product of his own battle with mental demons.

If the subject were less serious, Charles Linden's stories of how people can be debilitated by anxiety attacks would be almost comical.

They include the schoolteacher whose condition made her spend up to an hour turning a light switch on and off and the student who could not sit down for fear his coins would slip out of his pocket and give him an electric shock.

Another woman was cursed with the compulsion to obsessively re-tile her bathrooom to ensure none of her family had been sealed behind the wall by mistake.

"That level of anxiety is quite common - it might seem like psychotic behaviour to people who don't understand the condition but it's not psychotic at all, it's just just a simple worry driven by obsession to extreme lengths," he explains.

Charles Linden has a unique window on the minds of people tormented by anxiety conditions such as obsessive compulsive disorder and post traumatic distress disorder.

Tortured by school anxiety attacks throughout his childhood, when he was aged 13 his mother took him to a doctor after the youngster declared he wanted to die.

"My parents only sat up and listened because one day on the way to school I said I didn't want to live any more. My mom drove me straight to the doctors, " he said.

"There was no assistance at all, it was purely medicinal treatment. He gave me some old-school anti-depressants and sent me away.

"The attitude was dismissive, they didn't have the knowledge required to fully help someone with an anxiety disorder and they still don't.

"People just get on the drugs bandwagon. There's no follow-up procedures to check what is happening.

"People with anxiety attacks need support when they need it, not once a week with a regular appointment."

At 19, Charles sought refuge from his demons by moving to Germany, but his condition soon caught up with him and he fled back to England with just a bag of belongings, leaving his car, apartment and girlfriend behind.

Overweight, unfit and taking a cocktail of prescribed drugs like Valium to control his anxiety, Charles struggled through a university course but finally became so debilitated he could not work.

"It was just astounding. The chest pains, the indigestion all the time and the physical effects were terrible - I just went to pieces, " he said.

"The drugs made me worse, but the worse I got the more drugs they gave me. I felt so ill I just couldn't function."

In desperation, Charles turned to researching his condition on the Internet and spent months questioning and researching to compile case studies of hundreds of fellow sufferers.

The work resulted in a downloadable template with recovery patterns and helpful mental techniques Charles tried on himself and offered to others on a trial basis.

"I put together a list of things I could apply in my own life and started to see definite results. Within six months I was off the drugs and was almost back to normal," he says.

Conventional treatments recognise five different anxiety conditions - obsessive compulsive disorder, post traumatic stress disorder, panic disorder, generalised anxiety disorder and phobias - but Charles insists there is a common factor uniting the conditions.

"Most people have a default level of anxiety that returns to normal after they experience a shock, but with anxiety disorders, this default level is jacked up each time until it consumes every waking minute," he explains.

"Anxiety is the fuel that drives these conditions. Once you explain and understand that, you can see a lightbulb go off in the head of people and they start to be able to deal with their problems."

As more and more sufferers used his drug-free method to regain control of their lives, Charles realised he needed to devote more time to the venture and decied to set up a commercial site with a staff of councillors.

In just five years, The Linden Method has expanded to boast centres in Spain, the USA, Germany and Denmark, helping tens of thousands of people.

For a license fee of £117, sufferers get the Linden Method pack, CDs and a DVD delivered to their door, plus access to a team of councillors on hand whenever they are needed - and if the method does not help, Charles pledges to refund every penny.

"I've been there, I know how crippling and disabling it is. I feel very passionately about helping people - particularly young people - at the start of the condition before it gets as bad as I was," he says.

"I'm not interested in taking money from people I can't help. That's not what we are about.

"People should realise that they are not physically or mentally ill - they are suffering from a behavioural condition and because of that they can undo all of the changes in their subconscious. Our primary aim is to make people well.

     From British newspaper The Dudley Chronicle, Oct. 19th 2006, posted on the Linden Method site.

Here is one of many testimonials on the site: