FEARS and PHOBIAS

SPECIFIC PHOBIA

Topics in Mental Health 

By Shlomo Y. Radcliffe

What Is a Phobia?

Small children have lots of fears. Most of these disappear are on their own by the time a child is six years old. However, some children will continue to have an intense fear of some specific situation, object or person (like a clown) and some fears, left untreated, can last a lifetime. For instance, some people have a life long fear of spiders, heights or public speaking. When a fear is so intense that it causes panicky feelings, it is called a phobia.

Children and adults who have intense fears of specific situations or objects (the most common of which are animals, blood, traveling by airplane, claustrophobia, and thunderstorms) may have a condition called “specific phobia.” In order to diagnose a person with Specific Phobia the person must have the following symptoms:

• The person experiences a strong, persistent fear that is unreasonable or excessive. It is set off by a specific situation or object, which is either anticipated or actually present (i.e. a feeling of terror can occur just by thinking about having to fly as well as by actually having to get on the airplane).
• The person understands that the fear is unreasonable or stronger than what others feel.
• The situation or object that causes the fear almost always provokes an anxiety response, which may either be a Panic Attack or strong symptoms of anxiety (that does not meet the full criteria for Panic Attack).
• The person either avoids the feared situation or object or endures it with severe distress or anxiety.
• Children under 18 must have had the symptoms for six or more months.
• Either there is significant upset about this fear, or it significantly interferes with the person’s usual routines or social, personal or occupational functioning. For example, a bee phobia can cause a child to refuse to go to camp. A dog phobia may cause a child to refuse to visit certain friends or even to go to school.
• The symptoms are not better explained by any other anxiety disorder or mental disorder.

Treatment for Specific Phobia

There are many treatments for specific phobia. Cognitive-behavioral therapy is frequently employed. This treatment can involve examining one’s irrational fears, estimating likelihood of negative consequences and experimenting with the actual results of facing the feared situation or object. Desensitization is a form of therapy in which the person is taught to relax deeply and then faces the feared situation or object in small steps. For instance, a child with a clown phobia might be taught how to use his imagination to get very relaxed (think of lying on the sand on the beach) and then told to look at a picture of a clown and use the relaxation technique to calm any anxiety. Then the task would gradually become harder, always combined with relaxation: look at a clown on television, look at a clown costume, look at someone you know wearing the clown costume, look at a stranger wearing a clown costume in your house, look at a clown in an amusement park. Another treatment for phobias is Energy Psychology. This technique is rather new and still considered experimental but many people have used it to address phobias of all kinds. The benefit to this treatment is that it can be very rapid. In fact, it’s founder, Dr. Roger Callahan, has written a book entitled “The 5 Minute Phobia Cure.” More information about this approach can be found at www.emofree.com and under the search titles “energy psychology,” “thought-field therapy” or “EFT.” Another approach to the treatment of severe phobias is medication that induces relaxation. This may be used to help people cope with their flying phobias, public speaking phobias and dental phobias, among other fears. Medication simply blocks the fear pathways temporarily and doesn’t cure the phobia long term but it can certainly be helpful in certain situations. Some people have found that other therapeutic techniques like hypnosis or EMDR have helped with them phobias. In addition, some seek non-medical anxiety reduction through the use of alternative medicine such as herbal medicine.