Word: phobics
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...become quite clear over the years that those who go to Hollywood with the explicit intent of becoming famous inevitably end up in AAA meetings, Betty Ford or the adult section at VideoPros. And it’s not just drugs or alcohol—others slip into phobic behavior, sex addictions, obsessive-compulsive patterns, co-dependent relationships, hallucinations, etc. Maybe their mommies didn’t give them enough love. (Hmm, on that note, maybe while I’m off sending Winona Ryder some shampoo—she looks pretty dirty these days?...
...Goran Ost, a psychology professor at Stockholm University and one of the pioneers of one-day phobia treatments, a staggering 80% to 95% of patients get their phobias under control after just one session. And when symptoms disappear, they usually stay gone. Patients, he says, rarely experience a significant phobic relapse, and almost never replace the thing they no longer fear with a fresher phobia object...
...this patient, the problem wasn't mere low self-esteem but outright terror. To a social phobic, the mere prospect of a social encounter is frightening enough to cause sweating, trembling, light-headedness and nausea, accompanied by an overwhelming feeling of inadequacy. For some sufferers, the disorder is comparatively circumscribed--occurring only at large parties, say--making avoidance strategies seem easy. But social phobias can encroach into more and more areas of life, closing more and more doors. As sufferers grow increasingly isolated, they grow increasingly hopeless and risk developing such conditions as depression and alcoholism...
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...
...University's Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders calls this automatic thinking. It was even worse a few hours earlier when, as part of my treatment for a debilitating case of aviophobia (fear of flying), Dr. Hsia had booked me on Exposure Airlines. It's the newest thing in phobic therapy: a virtual airplane of hardware, software and fancy head-mounted display screens that feels like the real thing...