Word: phobics
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...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. In the past year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first drug--an existing antidepressant called Paxil--specifically for the treatment of social phobias...
...hard enough being a phobic adult, going through life fearing 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...
...That therapeutic involvement is much the same as it would be for an adult phobic: gradually exposing the child to the feared object or experience and teaching him or her, eventually, to live with it. Most of the time, doctors encourage parents of phobic kids to become involved in treatment, attending sessions and walking the child through the hierarchy of exposure - provided they can resist the natural impulse to step in and stop the session when the child starts to grow fearful. "Hard as it is for parents to watch," Phillipson says, "the only way for kids to get around...
...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...
...cartoonist kept him in a state of constant anxiety and dread. He loved to be asked to go places and do good things and receive prestigious honors, but he hated to leave home and routine. He felt he should meet people and see the world, but he was increasingly phobic about travel. He panicked on airplanes, broke out in a cold sweat at the very idea of a hotel lobby. At home in his studio, he loved receiving fan letters by the hundreds but resented the demands on his time. Perhaps because he refused so many requests for public appearances...