Phobia

Psychologists use the term phobia, which comes from the Greek for fear
(online translator says ????? (fovos) is fear, ????? (fovia) is phobia), for
a number of psychological conditions that can seriously disable their carriers.

Phobias are the most common form of anxiety disorder. An American study by
the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) found that between 5.1 and
21.5 percent of Americans suffer from phobias. Broken down by age and
gender, the study found that phobias were the most common psychiatric
illness among women in all age groups and the second most common illness
among men older than 25.

Most psychologists divide phobias into three categories:

   * social phobias - fears to do with other people and social relationships
     such as performance anxiety, fears of eating in public etc.
   * specific phobias - fear of a single specific panic trigger, like dogs,
     flying, running water and so on. (create an article on this topic)
   * agoraphobia - a generalised fear of leaving your home or your small
     familiar 'safe' area, and of the inevitable panic attacks that will
     follow. Agoraphobia is the only phobia regularly treated as a medical
     condition.

Many specific phobias, dogs, heights, spider bites, and so forth, are
extensions of fears that everyone has. People with these phobias treat them
by avoiding the thing they fear.

Many specific phobias can be traced back to a specific triggering event,
usually a traumatic experience at an early age. Social phobias and
agoraphobia have more complex causes that are not entirely known at this
time. It is believed that heredity, genetics and brain-chemistry combine
with life-experiences to play a major role in the development of anxiety
disorders and phobias.

Phobias vary in severity among individuals, with some phobics simply
disliking or avoiding the subject of their fear and suffering mild anxiety.
Others suffer fully-fledged panic attacks with all the associated disabling
symptoms.

The name of a phobia generally contains a Greek word for what the patient
fears plus -phobia. Creating these terms is something of a word game. Few of
these terms are found in medical literature. It is possible for a sufferer
to become phobic about virtually anything.

10 common phobias include:

  1. Arachnophobia - Fear of spiders.
  2. Anthrophobia - Fear of people or society
  3. Aerophobia - Fear of drafts, air swallowing or airborne noxious
     substances.
  4. Agoraphobia - Fear of the outdoors, crowds or uncontrolled social
     conditions.
  5. Claustrophobia - Fear of confined spaces.
  6. Acrophobia - Fear of heights.
  7. Cancerophobia - Fear of cancer.
  8. Astraphobia - Fear of thunder and lightning.
  9. Necrophobia - Fear of death or dead things.
 10. Cardiophobia - Fear of heart disease.

More phobia names are listed in the List of phobias.

Some therapists use virtual reality to desensitize patients to the feared
thing. Other forms of therapy that may be of benefit to phobics are
graduated exposure therapy and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT).
Anti-anxiety medication can also be of assistance in some cases. Most
phobics understand that they are suffering from an irrational fear, but are
powerless to override their initial panic reaction.

Graduated Exposure and CBT both work towards the goal of desensitising the
sufferer, and changing the thought patterns that are contributing to their
panic. Gradual desensitisation treatment and CBT are often extremely
successful, provided the phobic is willing to endure some discomfort and to
make a continuous effort over a long period of time. Practitioners of
neurolinguistic programming (NLP) claim to have a procedure that can be used
to alleviate most specific phobias in a single therapeutic session, though
this has not yet been verified scientifically.

In some cases, a fear or hatred is not considered a phobia in the clinical
sense because it is believed to be only a symptom of other psychic problems,
or the result of ignorance. These are phobias in a more general, popular
sense of the word:

   * xenophobia, fear of strangers or the unknown
   * homophobia, fear of homosexual people
   * islamophobia, fear of Muslims or Islamic culture

Furthermore, the term hydrophobia, or fear of water, is usually not a
psychological condition at all, but another term for the disease rabies,
referring to a common symptom.

How to - Physics - History - Companies - Internet - Video Games - List of Phobias - September 11, 2001
Radio - Timelines - Chemistry - Genealogy - Family - Film - SARS - Cancer - Medicine - DVD - Calendar
Countries - Disease - Health Science - Dentistry - Economics - AIDS - Law - Autism - Statistics - Bible
Recipes - Architecture - Computers - History of the Internet - Personal computer - Apple Macintosh
War - Presidents of the United States - United States Constitution - Universe - Philosophy - Animals
Biology - United States Constitution - Marketing Topics - Sports - Television - History of Computing

Debt Help - Free Credit Report - Mortgages - Loans - Cheap Flights