I find this rather odd: you say you are researching panic behaviour in pilots yet you state that this is not mentioned in reports. How do you know it exists? If what you are looking for is the layman's version of panic, 'completely losing it,' say, very few commercial pilots manage to get hired if they are prone to that behaviour.
It is usually fairly obvious when someone has too little control of their emotions to be trusted with a commercial flight so that actual instances of this are probably rare. And when there is a breakdown in the conduct of the flight, well, yes, that might well be covered up. You could make an educated guess that someone who made an irrational mistake was in an irrational frame of mine but as a researcher you are going to have two basic problems:
1. Dead men tell no tales.
2. Survivors aren't usually going to admit what they did if it was embarrassing, stupid or dangerous. The sort of personality that is going to make an unholy mess of things because of 'panic,' do you think he would come forward afterwards and be open about what he did?
I once had to work with a fellow who had painted himself into a corner and then crashed. It was a pretty bad crash, but everyone survived more through dumb luck than anything. I found myself stuck with the job of trying to get him sorted out, even though he maintained there was nothing wrong.
He had constructed an implausible scenario meant to explain every fact about what went on there, which he stuck to through thick and thin. All I wanted, as an instructor, was to get him to move on and deal with his shortcomings as a pilot.
Everything that went wrong was due to an external cause; if we went off-track it was a bad crosswind, if we missed seeing the runway it was a hazy day, if we couldn't track an NDB the needle was unsteady... I pointed out that the amount of effort he was putting into explaining everything meant that he had nothing left to put into learning, but his personality meant that he just stuck to his course. I reckoned that he had had such a fright there that he was blocking out the reality of the whole experience. This must have left him with the idea that his airplane had tried to kill him!
I finally was sent off in another direction while he managed to hang on to his job for quite a while longer. Then he finally was got rid of in a very diplomatic way, when he went back to his home country to another flying job. From what I heard he's still in aviation but on a very basic level. It may be that he ended up at his maximum level of incompetence. It would be perfectly true to say that, in his case at least, the system did not work as advertised.
You would never get one word out of that fellow that was of any use at all to you in your research! And other cases we could guess at, well, the crews are all dead. I guess you will just have to work with CVR tapes and guesswork in this one.