Word: phobias
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...science has so many phobias on the run, does that mean that the problem as a whole can soon be considered solved? Hardly. Like all other emotional disorders, phobias cause a double dip of psychic pain: from the condition and from the shame of having the problem in the first place. Over the years, researchers have made much of the fact that the large majority of phobia sufferers are women--from 55% for social phobias and up to 90% for specific phobias and extreme cases of agoraphobia. Hormones, genes and culture have all been explored as explanations. But the simplest...
...office--like heights and flying in airplanes--virtual-reality programs are available to provide simulated exposure under professional supervision. Software for other fears is being written all the time. "Not all people respond to virtual reality," says Barlow, "but on average, it's just as effective for treating certain phobias." If specific phobias were the only type of phobias around, things would be decidedly easier for doctors and patients. But the two other members of the phobia troika--social phobias and panic disorders--can be a little trickier...
...million Americans who have experienced or will someday suffer from a phobia (and many will have more than one), 35 million will suffer from social phobia, and the battle they fight is a harrowing one. Richard Heimberg at Temple University's Adult Anxiety Clinic often thinks of the 50-year-old patient who talked frequently about getting married and having a family--a reasonable dream, except that his terror of rejection had kept him from ever going out on a date. After much encouragement and counseling, he finally screwed up his courage enough to ask a woman out. The next...
...treatment for agoraphobia is much the same as it is for social phobia: cognitive-behavioral therapy and drugs. In many cases, recovery takes longer than it does for social phobias because agoraphobic behavior can become so entrenched. Nonetheless, once therapy and drug treatments get under way, they sometimes move surprisingly quickly. "The best way to treat agoraphobia," says Ost, "is by individual therapy, once a week for 10 or 12 weeks...
Making things even tougher, phobias are often hard to distinguish from other anxiety disorders. A person who feels compelled to wash or shower dozens of times a day may have a phobic's terror of germs, but a clinician would easily peg the problem as obsessive-compulsive disorder, not a specific phobia. The survivor of an airline crash may exhibit a phobic's panic at even a picture of a plane, but likely as not, the fear is one component of a larger case of post-traumatic stress disorder. Different conditions require different treatments, and without the right care...