"Come on, Marisa!" all of the fifth graders yelled from inside the big elevators. "Hurry up; don't you want to get to the top?" Marisa looked glum and thought to herself, "Of course I want to get to the top — that's why I came on this field trip." But when she glanced back at her friends, she felt jealous — how come none of them were terrified of riding in the elevator? "I'm OK," she said as brightly as she could. "I'll take the stairs and meet you there." When she realized how many stairs that would be, Marisa wasn't too happy. But she breathed a sigh of relief knowing that she wouldn't have to take that scary elevator ride. What you have read is a classic example of claustrophobia. That's why Marisa had to take the stairs. She has a phobia of being in closed-in spaces and was too scared to take the elevator. Sometimes, when a person has a phobia and is forced to face what makes her scared, she may get very nervous and have a panic attack.
Phobias are a common form of anxiety disorders. An American study by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) found that between 8.7% and 18.1% of Americans suffer from phobias. Broken down by age and gender, the study found that phobias were the most common mental illness among women in all age groups and the second most common illness among men older than 25.
Phobias are not generally diagnosed if they are not particularly distressing to the patient and if they are not frequently encountered. If a phobia is defined as "impairing to the individual", then it will be treated after being measured in context by the degree of severity. A large percent of the American population is afraid of public speaking, which could range from mild uncomfortability, to an intense anxiety that inhibits all social participation.
The Phobia and its Origin
“Phobia” was derived from the Greek word “phóbos” meaning “fear” or “morbid fear”. It is a deep and constant fear of certain situations, activities, things, animals, or people. The main indication of this disorder is the excessive and unreasonable desire to avoid the feared incentive. A phobia is different from normal fear because it is an extremely strong fear of a situation or thing. It is also a kind of fear that doesn't go away.
A person who has a phobia will be afraid of something every time he or she sees or experiences it. He won't just be afraid once or twice. People who have phobias habitually go out of their way to avoid the situation or thing that scares them.
This is caused by what are called, neutral, unconditioned, and conditioned stimuli, which trigger either conditioned or unconditioned responses. An example would be a person who was attacked by a dog (the unconditioned stimulus) would respond with an unconditioned response. When this happens, the unconditioned stimulus of them being attacked by the dog would become conditioned, and to this now conditioned stimulus, they would develop a conditioned response. If the episode had enough of an impact on this certain person then they would develop a fear of that dog, or in some cases, an unsubstantiated fear of all dogs.
What's a Panic Attack Like?
Panic attacks can be really scary and may make a person shake, sweat, and breathe quickly. Some people who have panic attacks may have chest pains, feel dizzy, or feel like their hearts are pounding and they can't breathe. A panic attack can cause a person to think something awful is going to happen, that he or she can't escape, or that he or she might lose control. Some people who have panic attacks say that when the attacks are happening, they feel like they can't think straight or that they're "going crazy." Panic attacks only last a short time. But to someone who is having one, they can feel much longer. Sometimes, even if a person knows that his or her phobia doesn't make sense, he or she may not be able to stop the mind and body from reacting and having a panic attack.
What causes a Phobia?
Phobias are known as an emotional response learned because of difficult life experiences. Generally phobias occur when fear produced by a threatening situation is transmitted to other similar situations, while the original fear is often repressed or forgotten. The excessive, unreasoning fear of water, for example, may be based on a childhood experience of almost drowning. The individual attempts to avoid that situation in the future, a response that, while reducing anxiety in the short term, reinforces the association of the situation with the onset of anxiety.
Types of Phobias
Psychologists and psychiatrists classify most phobias into three categories and such phobias are considered to be sub-types of anxiety disorder. The three categories are:
Social phobia- fears involving other people or social situations such as performance anxiety or fears of embarrassment by scrutiny of others, such as eating in public. Overcoming social phobia is often very difficult without the help of therapy or support groups.
Social phobia may be further subdivided into generalized social phobia (also known as social anxiety disorder or simply social anxiety) and specific social phobia, in which anxiety is triggered only in specific situations. The symptoms may extend to psychosomatic manifestation of physical problems. For example, sufferers of paruresis find it difficult or impossible to urinate in reduced levels of privacy. This goes far beyond mere preference: when the condition triggers, the person physically cannot empty their bladder.
Specific phobias - fear of a single particular thing which sets off panic attack such as spiders, snakes, dogs, water, heights, flying, catching a specific illness, etc. Many people have these fears but to a lesser degree than those who suffer from specific phobias. People with the phobias explicitly avoid the entity they fear.
Agoraphobia - a generalized fear of leaving home or a small familiar 'safe' area, and of possible panic attacks that might follow. It may also be caused by various specific phobias such as fear of open spaces, social embarrassment (social agoraphobia), fear of contamination (fear of germs, possibly complicated by obsessive-compulsive disorder) or PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) related to a trauma that occurred out of doors such as a war zone.
Phobias vary in severity among individuals. Some individuals can simply avoid the subject of their fear and suffer relatively mild anxiety over that fear. Others suffer full-fledged panic attacks with all the associated disabling symptoms. Most individuals understand that they are suffering from an irrational fear, but they are powerless to override their initial panic reaction.
Treatments
Various methods are claimed to treat phobias. Their proposed benefits may vary from person to person.
Some therapists use virtual reality or imagery exercise to desensitize patients to the feared entity. These are parts of systematic desensitization therapy.
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can be beneficial. Cognitive behavioral therapy lets the patient understand the cycle of negative thought patterns, and ways to change these thought patterns. CBT may be conducted in a group setting. Gradual desensitization treatment and CBT are often successful, provided the patient is willing to endure some discomfort. In one clinical trial, 90% of patients were observed with no longer having a phobic reaction after successful CBT treatment.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) have been demonstrated in peer-reviewed clinical trials to be effective in treating some phobias. Mainly used to treat Post-traumatic stress disorder, EMDR has been demonstrated as effective in easing phobia symptoms following a specific trauma, such as a fear of dogs following a dog bite.
Hypnotherapy coupled with Neuro-linguistic programming can also be used to help remove the associations that trigger a phobic reaction. However, lack of research and scientific testing compromises its status as an effective treatment.
Antidepressant medications such SSRIs, MAOIs may be helpful in some cases of phobia. Benzodiazepines may be useful in acute treatment of severe symptoms but the risk benefit ratio is against their long-term use in phobic disorders.
Emotional Freedom Technique, a psychotherapeutic alternative medicine tool, also considered to be pseudoscience by the mainstream medicine, is allegedly useful.
Non-psychological conditions
The word "phobia" may also signify conditions other than fear. For example, although the term hydrophobia means a fear of water, it may also mean inability to drink water due to an illness, or may be used to describe a chemical compound which repels water. Likewise, the term photophobia may be used to define a physical complaint (i.e. aversion to light due to inflamed eyes or excessively dilated pupils) and does not necessarily indicate a fear of light.
Non-clinical uses of the term
It is possible for an individual to develop a phobia over virtually anything. The name of a phobia generally contains a Greek word for what the patient fears plus the suffix -phobia. Creating these terms is something of a word game. Few of these terms are found in medical literature. However, this does not necessarily make it a non-psychological condition.
Terms for prejudice or discrimination
Many words with the suffix -phobia are primarily understood as negative attitudes towards certain categories of people or other things, used in an analogy with the medical usage of the term. Usually these kinds of "phobias" are described as fear, dislike, disapproval, prejudice, hatred, discrimination, or hostility towards the object of the "phobia". Often this attitude is based on prejudices and is a particular case of general xenophobia.
Class discrimination is not always considered a phobia in the clinical sense because it is believed to be only a symptom of other psychological issues, or the result of ignorance, or of political or social beliefs. In other words, unlike clinical phobias, which are usually qualified with disabling fear, class discrimination usually has roots in social relations.
Here are some examples:
Chemophobia - prejudice against artificial substances in favor of "natural" substances.
Ephebiphobia - fear or dislike of youth or adolescents.
Homophobia - fear or dislike of homosexuals or homosexuality.
Xenophobia- fear or dislike of strangers or the unknown sometimes used to describe nationalistic political beliefs and movements. It is also used in fictional work to describe the fear or dislike of space aliens.
Alcohol dependence and phobic anxiety states
Sixty alcoholics (40 males) were assessed for agoraphobia and social phobia, and over half the sample were rated as having either or both these disorders when last drinking. Twenty one subjects had mild phobias and eleven had severe phobias. The more severely phobic males were also found to be the most alcohol dependent and those with no phobias were least alcohol dependent but this effect was not found among the females. All phobic alcoholics reported that alcohol had helped them to cope in feared situations, and almost all had deliberately used it for this purpose. A small sample of out-patients referred for phobias alone were also asked about their use of alcohol. The majority had found it helpful in coping with fears, although more men than women had deliberately used it for this purpose.
Conclusion
Phobias are a phenomenon not uncommon in our society, which tend to make people afraid of social contact as they do not want to be viewed in society as an impaired individual. This causes loss of confidence in individuals and they stop communicating with each other for fear of their problem being revealed. This also destroys the people’s creativity and optimistic approach towards life and introduces destructive approaches in its stead. People with severe phobias feel ashamed of their ineptitude of handling fear like other people do so, often, they commit suicide. This kind of behavior is hardly beneficial to society so this should be remedied by any means possible.
References
Wikipedia
Kidshealth .org
The phobia list.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment