Phobia

A phobia (term derived from Phobos, in ancient Greek φόβος, 'fear', son of Ares and Aphrodite in Greek mythology, the personification of fear) is a disorder Anxiety characterized by an intense, disproportionate and irrational fear of beings, objects or specific situations, such as insects (entomophobia) or closed places (claustrophobia). However, it is not simply a fear, since they have great differences. It is also usually classified as a phobia, a feeling of hatred or rejection towards something that, although it is not an emotional health disorder, does generate many emotional, social and political (see xenophobia, that is, hatred of foreigners or strangers or homophobia, hatred of homosexuals, or Christianophobia, hatred of Christians). A study in the USA by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) found that between 8.7% and 18.1% of Americans suffer from phobias. Discriminating age and gender, it was found that phobias are the most common mental illness among women in all age groups, and the second most common psychopathy in men over the age of twenty-five.^{[citation needed]}

History

Specific phobias are a type of anxiety disorder, in which a person may feel drastically anxious or have a panic attack once they are exposed to the object of fear. These are one of the most frequent psychiatric disorders, because one in twenty-three (4.35%) people on the planet suffers from a phobia, eleven million two hundred thousand Americans suffer from social phobia, a persistent and bizarre fear of situations that may involve scrutiny and judgment by others, such as parties and other social events.^{[citation required]}

Watson, who through analysis of conditioning techniques, was able to establish a rabbit phobia in an 11-month-old baby, also known as Tiny Albert. In this experiment, Watson associated a natural fear in the infant (the fear of loud sounds) with a stimulus that gave him pleasure (the rabbit). After numerous iterations, Albert developed a phobia of rabbits and of anything white or similar in texture to rabbit fur.^{[citation needed]}

Components and symptoms of phobias

a) Significant increase in vegetative activation: tachycardia, sweating, peripheral vasoconstriction, flushing, paleness, stomach upset, dry mouth, diarrhea, etc. (reactions at the level of the physiological system).

b) Avoidance or escape behavior: when the subject unexpectedly finds himself in the feared situation, if the subject is forced to remain in said situation, then motor execution disturbances may appear at the level vocal and/or verbal: trembling voice, facial grimaces, strange movements of the extremities, rigidity, difluences, etc. (reactions at the motor system level).

c) Anticipation of favorable or catastrophic consequences: is the negative evaluation of the situation and/or of one's abilities, concern for semantic reactions and thoughts of escape or avoidance (reactions to level of the cognitive system).

d) Thoughts of harm: whoever suffers from a phobia and is confronted with the object or situation that they fear, may come to think that they will suffer lethal harm or that they are on the brink of death.

Treatment

Psychological therapies that can be beneficial for people with phobias are: the "immersion" or graduated exposure therapies, including Systematic Desensitization (SD). All of these techniques fall under the cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) approach. In some cases, anti-anxiety medications may also help. Most people who have phobias understand that they are suffering from an irrational or disproportionate fear, although this recognition does not prevent them from continuing to manifest that intense emotional reaction to the phobic stimulus.

Graded exposure and CBT work with the goal of desensitizing the person and changing the thought patterns that are contributing to their fear. Techniques based on CBT are the most effective, as long as the person with this problem is willing to undergo a treatment that can last a few months (sometimes weeks). There are other therapeutic orientations, such as psychoanalysis or neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) that address these problems clinically, but they last longer and are less effective.

For NLP, any phobia is associated with an intense emotional state related to fear, which is linked to a particular event experienced by the person. There is no direct relationship between the phobia itself and the event that caused it, for example, if someone suffers from a phobia of spiders, it does not mean that they have had a traumatic event with spiders, spiders only represent a trigger for their emotional state internal. The solution that NLP proposes is to eliminate that trigger, once it is eliminated, there is no possibility that the phobia will appear.

In phobias, the fear alarm system is too rigid: it is always overly sensitive. In therapy, the patient will be taught to modulate all of this through specific psychological techniques. On the one hand, helping him to force himself to look at what scares him and not to watch his surroundings so much. On the other, ensuring that he learns to regulate his automatic interpretations. It is not easy, because the reasoning capacity of phobic people is under the effect of their emotional processes: our intelligence is therefore under the influence of these processes.

Specific phobias are usually treated through psychotherapy, which, while teaching the patient the causes of their phobia, provides them with techniques to gradually control anxiety when faced with the triggering stimulus. Techniques to control breathing and muscle tension can also be very helpful.

Types of treatment

• Exposure technique: In this, little by little, the professionals confront the patient with the situation so feared. The gradual and progressive stimulus makes people gradually control their fears. With the use of virtual reality, this technique can be used in any kind of phobia. Increasing the effectiveness and acceptance of the patient to face the phobic stimulus.
• Systematic dissensitization: In which instead of stimuli the patient's imagination is used, which is projected in his mind to the feared stimulus. In both examples of treatment, the exposure or imagination of the stimulus stops when the patient cannot control his anxiety, and it is recommended when he has calmed down. Little by little, he manages to resist longer periods and thus he loses his fear.
• Cognitive therapy: In which the patient is given a lot of information about the situation to which he fears, so that in this way he is gaining confidence (this treatment is used a lot with patients suffering from aerophobia – feared to fly- and who nevertheless need to be able to get on a plane due to labor motives).
• Shock methods: (behavioral therapies where forced exposure to stimulus occurs, until the patient controls their anxiety). The use of psychopharmaceuticals is not usually recommended in the treatment of phobias, because, although it can alleviate the symptoms of anxiety, it does not eliminate the problem.
• Neurolinguistic Programming (PNL): It has become fashionable as a treatment for certain phobias, but the results of it have not yet been scientifically proven. But the truth is that the removal of the phobia happens, the patient after working with PNL no longer experiences any manifestation of the previous symptoms of his phobia.
• PNL techniques: It is about identifying the three aspects that make up a memory, the visual aspect, the sensory (emotion) and the auditory, then working with them in such a way that the person is disconnected from emotions, images and what he hears during the phobic episode. After disconnection, the phobia will no longer manifest.

Factors

The factors of a phobia are sometimes difficult to determine and can be the result of a number of things.

The factors can be temperamental, especially in the case of people who suffer from neurosis or behavioral inhibition.

In addition, the factors may be environmental and depend on the encounters of the individual with their environment. These encounters are usually negative or even traumatic, to the point of favoring anxiety disorders responsible for phobias.

Lastly, they can also be caused by genetics. Some phobias have been shown to be 'inherited', in the sense that a genetic vulnerability can be 'passed down' to other phobias. between related people.

Non-psychological cases

The term "phobia" it can mean specific cases not related to fear. For example, hydrophobia is the fear of water, and ancrophobia is the fear of wind, but it can also be the inability to drink water due to disease (see rabies), or it can also describe a chemical compound that repels water. ^{[citation needed]} For its part, photophobia does not necessarily mean a fear of light: it can be a physical problem with the eyes or an aversion to light that it can inflame them or dilate the pupil.

Many terms with the suffix -phobia are related to negative attitudes towards a certain category of people or things, analogous to the medical use of the term. Usually these "phobias" They are described as fear, disgust, disapproval, prejudice, hatred, discrimination, or hostility against the object of the phobia. Most of the time they are attitudes based on prejudices, such as, for example, the specific case of xenophobia, rejection of foreigners, or homophobia, rejection of homosexuals.