Phobia

Phobias are very emotive subjects. Some people - the lucky ones, who don't suffer from a phobia - believe that those who do are either putting it on for sympathy, are completely emotionally unstable or are just pathetic types who need to get over it. Perhaps this is true for some people who claim to be phobic, but for the millions of people out there, phobias are the causes of untold misery.

Many people would say they either have a phobia or know someone with a phobia - but I believe that a fair proportion of these people are wrong. Simply not liking something, or finding something a bit scary, is not the same as having a phobia. There is a difference between Person A, who dislikes snakes, Person B, who is frightened of snakes, and Person C, who suffers fro ophiuchophobia.

Say Persons A, B and C go to the zoo together, and come upon the reptile house. Person A can go into the reptile house without a second thought, and will probably gaze at the boas and cobras in fascinated disgust, before shuddering to themselves and moving on to the crocodiles. Person B might go into the reptile house with Person A, but won't go near the snakes, not even to glance through the glass at them.

Person C probably wouldn't have gone to the zoo in the first place. Knowing my luck, Person C thinks, those things will get out and kill me.

See the difference? The phobia has caused Person C to alter their behaviour in an irrational way: they think that it's likely the snakes will escape from the reptile house and find them amongst the thousands of people at the zoo, and kill them.

Snake phobia, and certain other phobias like it, are quite likely to be a collective, natural, human fear of dangerous creatures, like snakes, spiders etc. Animals in the wild steer clear of them because they can be dangerous, and it's a "throwback", if you will, to when humans were just another type of wild animal. Being frightened of snakes is probably a good thing, especially if you're a child who lives in a country where very dangerous snakes are prevalent, such as Australia. A phobia occurs, however, when the fear of snakes becomes wholly irrational, and starts to take over someone's life - an adult living in Ireland, where there aren't even harmless snakes, who avoids fashion shops because they sell fake snakeskin handbags, for example.

Phobias of certain objects or things, like feather phobia, spider phobia or water phobia, can easily be cured in numerous ways. Desensitisation is especially effective: this is where the sufferer slowly becomes introduced to whatever it is they are frightened of. If a person is terrified of mice, then the desensitisation process starts off with the sufferer perhaps looking at a drawing of a mouse until s/he can do so comfortably, with no sense of panic or discomfort. Then they would move on to a photograph of a mouse, and so on until they are actually able to hold a living, breathing mouse in their hands. A recent BBC Television documentary showed a woman with a phobia of worms being cured of her lifelong terror within half an hour. Her life was changed dramatically - not only could she now go outside in the rain quite happily, but she was also able to see her daughter play in football matches, something that moved both mother and daughter to tears. Such is the effectiveness of this treatment.

Desensitisation can only be effective, though, if it is taken at the sufferer's own pace, going as fast or as slow as they can. Forcing a phobic to suddenly confront their most feared object is more than likely to spark off a panic attack there and then, which only reinforces the negative feelings associated with the object of fear. That type of treatment is known as flooding, and although it has some merits, it is not commonly practised. It can be useful in treatment of certain conditions, though - fear of heights is a good example, where the sufferer is taken to the top of a tall building, and remains there until they feel safe.

Unfortunately, though, desensitisation and flooding are not always appropriate treatments for a phobia. How do you slowly introduce a necrophobia sufferer to death, for example? It's just not possible: you can't exactly let them sit with a dead body, or let them be dead for a couple of minutes to see that it's perfectly safe!

Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is sometimes effective in these cases, which are often phobias of concepts and abstracts as opposed to actual physical objects (agoraphobia and claustrophobia are good examples). This treatment involves talking through what you are actually afraid of, what feelings you experience when you have a phobic attack, and how to deal with those feelings. Unfortunately, while effective, CBT is not as successful at curing phobias as desensitisation. I don't mean to say that phobias can't be cured with CBT, but usually the phobias that need to be treated with CBT run much deeper and have more complicated underlying causes than a "simple" phobia, such as a fear of snakes.

The phobias that CBT is usually employed to treat are often grouped together as "social phobia", as these phobias are much more likely to alter a person's behaviour and disrupt their lives much more than the simpler phobias. They can also cause many different health problems: people with sleep phobia, for example, will suffer terribly from the effects of sleep deprivation, and some common symptoms of vomit phobia such as extreme weight loss and a reluctance to eat are often confused with other psychological disorders such as anorexia nervosa. CBT is employed in these cases to try and reach the root cause of the phobia, which is usually not the object of fear itself: the phobia is usually a symptom of a deeper problem.

I suffer from emetophobia, which is the technical name for a fear of vomit and/or vomiting. I am terrified of both being sick myself and of other people being sick, and even just typing those words has pushed my heart rate up considerably. You can read about how my phobia affects my life here.

So remember, there's a difference between being frightened of something, and having a phobia of it. If someone says they have a phobia of, for example, flying, but don't run screaming inside when a plane passes overhead, then it's quite safe to assume that they're actually just frightened of flying. A true phobic is someone who is absolutely terrified of anything and everything that could be associated with their object of fear - and if those associations don't make sense to you, the non-phobic, then it's even more likely that the phobia is real.

Phobic people are not putting it on, or being weak, or any of the other myriad insults that have come our way over the years. Phobias are on the whole treatable psychological conditions, just like depression or anxiety, and can develop at any time in a person's life (although they do tend to be acquired in early childhood). There also seems to be an inherited tendency to be phobic - I'm not saying that specific phobias run in families, but I think it's often the case that it's more common that not for a phobic to be related to another phobic. In my own family, there's not only my sister and I, but my mother and aunt both have true phobias as well - the tendency to be phobic seems to run in my mother's side of the family. Research into the cause and cure of persistent phobias is still fairly limited, and I hope that sometime in the future, I will be cured of my own fear.