Speaking as someone who does actually have a generalized anxiety disorder, a couple of things in the thread jumped out at me. Someone mentioned getting an eventual diagnosis of Lyme disease for another child who had suddenly become allergic to going to school. When you have GAD or any of the other more specific anxiety wotzits, people assume that it’s psychological stress that triggers panic attacks, but it’s really any kind of stress that can set you a-wobble. I can always tell when I’m getting sick long before my nose starts running or my throat starts hurting, because suddenly the ‘danger! danger!’ alarms start going off almost at random. The human body has a limited number of ways to tell you something is going wrong, and as it turns out, ‘impending doom’ can feel a lot like ‘impending head cold’, only with less overall snot.
(So can ‘impending menstrual cramps’, but I don’t expect your son needs to worry about that. :D)
The other one is that it seems to be a mornings-only problem. You can put yourself under an enormous amount of stress by forcing yourself to be awake when your body thinks it ought to be asleep. My worst malfunction ever was partly caused when an overnight job suddenly turned into a super-early-mornings job, at the behest of corporate management. What happens on the weekends? Does he sleep in a lot later than he does on school days? You mention 5:30am – that would be a misery for someone who isn’t natively a morning person. My high school started at 7:20 in the morning, and I physically couldn’t do it; I skipped a lot of days, and went through a terrible ‘freak out beforehand, then fall asleep in class’ cycle when I did go.
So, basically, your kiddo might actually be fine with school, but something is going on that makes it physically hard for him to handle dragging himself there. He knows it’s not ‘right’ and you guys are worried about it, which sparks a panic attack. I also hasten to add that this is not your fault for being worried – panic attacks like to look for an excuse to happen, and if he’s having some kind of internal issues, it may not be a matter of something causing it, as his brain realizing something is wrong and flailing around for a reason for the wrongness to be going on.
You can look forward to a load of apologies from him for it, though. We do realize we’re being irrational, and that this inconveniences other people, and we feel tremendously bad about it. 