Word: phobias
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...every phobia the infinitely inventive--and infinitely fearful--human mind can create, there is a word that has been coined to describe it. There's nephophobia, or fear of clouds, and coulrophobia, the fear of clowns. There's kathisophobia, fear of sitting, and kyphophobia, fear of stooping. There are xanthophobia, leukophobia and chromophobia, fear of yellow, white and colors in general. There are alektorophobia and apiphobia, fear of chickens and bees. And deep in the list, lost in the Ls, there's lutraphobia, or fear of otters--a fear that's useful, it would seem, only if you happen...
...most people, the treatment of phobias has been a cope-as-you-go business: preflight cocktails for the fearful flyer, stairways instead of elevators for the claustrophobe. But such home-brew tactics are usually only stopgaps at best. Happily, safe and lasting phobia treatments are now at hand. In an era in which more and more emotional disorders are falling before the scythe of science, phobias are among the disorders falling fastest...
Researchers are making enormous progress in determining what phobias are, what kinds of neurochemical storms they trigger in the brain and for what evolutionary purpose the potential for such psychic squalls was encoded into us in the first place. With this understanding has come a magic bag of treatments: exposure therapy that can stomp out a lifetime phobia in a single six-hour session; virtual-reality programs that can safely simulate the thing the phobic most fears, slowly stripping it of its power to terrorize; new medications that can snuff the brain's phobic spark before it can catch...
...something that can cause as much suffering as a phobia, it's remarkable how many people lay claim to having one--and how many of them are wrong. Self-described computer phobics are probably nothing of the kind. They may not care for the infernal machines and may occasionally want to throw one out the window, but that's not the same as a full-fledged phobia. Self-described claustrophobics often misdiagnose as well. The middle seat on a transatlantic flight may be something you approach with dismay, but unless you also experience a racing heart and ragged breath...
...metaphorical monsters under metaphorical beds. But suppose you were having the same fears in childhood, a stage of life when monsters are somehow more than metaphors and the bed they're hiding under is your very own. How can parents distinguish a passing childhood fear from a full-blown phobia? And what can they do to help? The good news for most parents - not to mention their kids - is that the majority of childhood terrors are fleeting. In a big, forbidding world that most children can't begin to make sense of, it's normal to gather up free-floating...