Sunday Profile : ENOUGH IS ENOUGH : For 20 years, actress Lani O’Grady was gripped by panic attacks. But last year, a psychiatrist in Mission Viejo entered the picture and helped her turn her life around.

Lani O’Grady played Mary, the Bradford clan’s strong and self-confident eldest daughter.

During the series’ heyday, however, fans were unaware that O’Grady suffered panic attacks so severe that she’d frequently run to her dressing room to pop a Valium or two and once shook and cried so much during a scene that someone had to drive her home.

The lowest point in her 20-year bout with panic attacks came early last year, when agoraphobia kept her at home and her body was so toxic from abusing prescription drugs and alcohol that she was experiencing memory blackouts.

By then, mere panic attacks would have been a luxury.

“I lived in panic: Fear was the only four-letter word I used,” said O’Grady, 39, whose life changed dramatically last spring.

The turn-around came when O’Grady was admitted to Charter Hospital in Mission Viejo, where a psychiatrist, Martin Jensen, discovered the cause of her problem: a brain chemical imbalance, which is now being treated with non-narcotic medication.

Jensen describes O’Grady’s condition when she checked into the hospital a year ago as no less than catastrophic.

“She was very near death,” he said.

The treatment, O’Grady said, has made all the difference in the world: “I have a life today.”

Since an “Entertainment Tonight” segment on her ordeal aired last summer, O’Grady has been making the rounds of TV talk shows. Jensen, for whom she has been working as a personal assistant and office manager since last fall, always accompanies her on the air. As O’Grady said, “I can’t answer the medical questions.”

Jensen initially brought O’Grady into his office to help answer mail. Their talk show appearances--particularly one last year on “Sally Jessy Raphael”--spurred thousands of viewers to write requesting information about brain chemical imbalances, which, Jensen said, can cause everything from panic attacks and depression to agoraphobia and “any type of feeling of mental discomfort.”

O’Grady and Jensen, who recently returned from another round of talk shows, also garnered some unexpected publicity earlier this year: They found themselves the subject of a supermarket tabloid story in which Jensen’s estranged wife claims that he walked out on their five-year marriage last fall to be with O’Grady.

Jensen said he was “let go” from his position as associate medical director at Charter Hospital in Mission Viejo as a result of the controversy created by the Star magazine story. A hospital spokeswoman declined to comment on Jensen’s departure.

In response to questions about his relationship with O’Grady, Jensen, 40, described it as being strictly on a “friendship level” and said he respects the “doctor-patient boundary.” He calls the claims made in the article “destructive” and insists that they “should not be given any more attention. It’s better for myself and Lani to let that pass.”

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At O’Grady’s request, Jensen was on hand to talk about the medical side of her story during an interview in Jensen’s office in which she discussed her years of suffering panic attacks, her career as a child actress and her life today.

Pictures taken a few months before she was hospitalized a year ago show a barely recognizable O’Grady. She was overweight and bloated, largely because of her drug and alcohol abuse.

Now lean again, with stylish, honey-blond hair, she looks like only a slightly older version of Mary Bradford. Self-confident and assertive, she spoke enthusiastically about getting better. Her distinctively low voice broke only once as she described how she owes her life to Jensen’s treatment.

“I am happier than I have ever been in my entire life--even before I started suffering--and I’m a different person because I can help other people like me get well,” said O’Grady, who often talks with Jensen’s patients on the phone and when they come into the office.

When patients talk to her, she said, “they know they’re talking to somebody who knows what they’re feeling.” And being a celebrity is an asset, she said. “They feel comfortable with me, so it’s really neat. It’s like my second career, and it beats the heck out of the first one.”

That’s not to say she hasn’t always enjoyed acting.

Other former child actors making the rounds of the talk shows paint a negative picture of their early years in show business. Not O’Grady.

“I have a real hard time with people who have been successful in this business as young children . . . and (as adults) they are no longer wanted by Hollywood--and, yeah, Hollywood is not a user-friendly place.

“But rather than accepting responsibility for their life, it’s easier to say, ‘The business is the reason I’m so messed up today.’ I hate that. It really angers me.”

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From her perspective as someone whose modeling career began as an infant and who began acting at a young age, O’Grady said, “the business is a wonderful thing to experience.”

She followed the lead of her brother, Don Grady, one of the original Mousketeers, who went on to co-star in the popular ‘60s sitcom “My Three Sons” and is now a successful Hollywood composer.

She remembers visiting her brother on the “My Three Sons” set when she was 6. When the show’s star, Fred MacMurray, heard her low voice, he turned around and said, “Who said that?”

“I looked up and said, ‘I did, sir,’ ” she recalled. “And he said, ‘Boy, you ought to be in the business.’ ”

O’Grady, whose childhood goal was “to do a family show just like my brother,” didn’t have any trouble finding an agent. Her mother, Mary Grady, is one of the top children’s agents in Hollywood.

But knowing the emotional toll the rejection that accompanies an acting career can have on young actors, Mary Grady said she never pushed her daughter into acting. In fact, she said, it wasn’t until her daughter was 13 and kept hounding her to send her out on an audition that she finally relented, “just to satisfy her.”

Sent out to read for a two-line bit in “High Chaparral,” Mary Grady said, her daughter wound up landing the lead in the episode, “and she just kept going.”

O’Grady recalls that she worked so often as a teen-ager that “I was very rarely in school. And it was real uncomfortable when I’d go back because they’d all make fun of me, especially in junior high.”

She legally changed her real name--Lanita Rose Agrati--to Lani O’Grady at 18 when she landed her role in “Eight Is Enough” in 1974. For professional reasons, her mother and brother had already changed their last name from Agrati to Grady.

O’Grady recalls having her first “strong feeling of anxiety” when her parents divorced when she was 5, but any feelings of anxiety didn’t resurface until she was 16 or 17 and then only sporadically: “It was nothing that I thought really meant anything. Anxiety? So what.”

By 18, however, she had begun having regular panic attacks; the first doctor she saw prescribed Valium.

“It took away every piece of anxiety I had, so I started using Valium regularly, and I found when I couldn’t take the Valium I would have these panic attacks,” O’Grady said.

It wasn’t until she was 21 that panic disorder was diagnosed.

“For the last three or four years before that,” she said, “I thought that maybe I had a mental problem: What’s going on? Am I having a nervous breakdown?”

In an effort to have the disorder “fixed,” O’Grady said, she saw 32 different doctors--psychiatrists, internists, neurologists--over the years. “The only kind of doctor I didn’t see was a vet.”

Most of the doctors prescribed Valium or another mild tranquilizer, Xanax. “What they did is they tried to fix the symptom, not the problem,” said O’Grady, who experienced only minor panic attacks during the first few years of doing “Eight Is Enough.”

But by the third or fourth year, she said, “it was necessary to take Valium during the day to just be OK enough to work, to calm me down.”

When the actress playing the mother on the series died, the writers wrote her death into the script. Ironically, as the eldest daughter on the show, O’Grady said, her character “was pretty much the one who held everything together.

“It was amazing because in my own life I was beginning to fall apart, and to have to maintain that kind of strength on screen was, at times, extremely difficult.”

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The series ended production in 1980; four months later, O’Grady checked into a hospital for Valium detox. She was in and out of four other rehabs over the next decade, a time in which she primarily lived in Dana Point and earned a living from occasional acting jobs, residuals and investments.

But while she managed to remain sober for nearly six years in the ‘80s, she said, she continued to feel varying degrees of anxiety. Then it got worse.

By 1992, O’Grady said, “I started really abusing prescription medication. You build up a resistance, and you need more to do the same, and it was getting pretty bad.”

At one point, she moved to Burbank to be near her family.

“A part of my family is very religious, and so they brought me to church,” she said. “They thought that would be the way to solve my panic attacks. Well, heck, I was ready to try anything.”

Mary Grady said she was never aware her daughter experienced panic attacks during the time she was living at home, until her condition had become painfully obvious.

“I did what a mother does and that’s try to help (your child) out,” she said. “Finally, I couldn’t stand watching her die.”

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By the time O’Grady first went to Jensen, about three years ago, she acknowledges, “I was in pretty bad shape.

“He kept wanting to try different (non-narcotic) medications on me to get me well, and I was just not cooperative. I would try a medication, and I would go back to the Xanax or the Valium because it was easier than trying to get well. I wasn’t ready. The bottom line is I hadn’t gotten scared enough.”

During the last two months before she went into the hospital, she said, she had been getting Valium prescriptions from four different doctors and “taking at least five times more than I should have.” She also had begun drinking again and, she said, was agoraphobic.

Last spring she returned to Jensen “to see if I could get more drugs out of him, and he took one look at me and said, ‘No more pills.’ He said, ‘You’re not going to be one of the phone calls I get; you’re not going to be a casualty.’ ”

But what he next said to her, she said, changed her life.

“He said, ‘Life is fleeting, like that’-- she snapped her fingers--’and there is no more. You’re dead forever, not dead for a couple of days.’ He looked me right in the eye, and I didn’t lose eye contact the entire time he said it.”

The night before she checked into Charter Hospital, O’Grady suffered a complete memory blackout.

“That’s how toxic my body was,” she said, adding that she doesn’t remember her first two days in the hospital. “They were afraid I was going to die.”

Jensen said that although O’Grady had become motivated enough to get into the hospital, “we couldn’t have made any progress unless the chemical imbalance were fixed. That’s when the real change happens.”

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Jensen said a variety of brain chemical imbalances can cause panic attacks. When he found the right medication for O’Grady, he said, it took less than an hour for her to feel the difference.

“It was incredible,” O’Grady said. “I had a feeling I hadn’t had in 18 years, which was whatever normal is.” She laughed, adding: “I didn’t know what normal was anymore, but I felt like I had my life, I felt human.”

O’Grady takes a non-narcotic medication daily. Today, she said, “I have no desire to drink at all, and I don’t need to abuse any medication, because I’m fine; I don’t have panic attacks.”

Since going to work in Jensen’s office in the fall, O’Grady has set aside her acting career.

“Money can’t buy what I get from people,” she said.

But a script is being written for an “Eight Is Enough” TV movie, she said, and if it’s given the go-ahead, she would happily join her co-stars on what would be the third Bradford family TV reunion since 1987--and the first since she has gotten better.

“I just want to say that back then, if I had known there was someone like this, boy, I tell you. . . ,” she said, looking at Jensen. “I love acting, but if I could have been fixed back then--there were so many times I couldn’t appreciate it because I was so sick.”

Tearing up, she added, “It makes me sad that I didn’t find him earlier--that I could have enjoyed what blessings I had even more than I did.”