Phobia | History, Types & Causes

Phobia, the serious, unreasonable fear of a specific event or circumstance. Phobia is defined as a form of anxiety condition as paranoia is the key symptom felt by the individual.

Phobias are believed to have experienced nervous reactions. It is widely believed that phobias arise when anxiety induced by an initial dangerous circumstance is passed to other related circumstances, with the original concern sometimes repressed or ignored.

Excessive, unreasoning terror of water, for example, could be focused on a lost childhood memory of near-drowning. As a consequence, the individual attempts to escape this circumstance in the future, a reaction that, while mitigating fear in the short term, strengthens the person's relationship with the emergence of fear.

History

The term Phobia derives from the Greek phrase: Phobos, meaning "aversion," "terror" or "morbid terror." A standard scheme for identifying different phobias using a prefix based on the Greek term for the source of terror, plus the suffix-phobia. However, there are also unevenly called phobias with Latin prefixes, such as apiphobia instead of melissaphobia (fear of bees) or aviphobia instead of ornithophobia (fear of birds). 

It's a word game to build such words. These concerns are of a psychological rather than a physiological nature, although none of these are found in the scientific literature. Phobos was the twin brother of Deimos (terror) in ancient Greek mythology.

In fact, phobias are diverse and nuanced. Individuals have had phobias for thousands of years, but just lately have we learned-or even known sufficiently to term them phobias-about these fears.

⮞ The earliest written reference to the phobic issues was ancient Greek doctor Hippocrates (470-410 B.C.E).

He spoke of the various diseases and concerns of his patients.

The term phobia was not used until around 500 years later when Roman doctor Celsus simply used the term hydrophobia, water aversion, to define a person who was afraid of water due to rabies. 

⮞ The term "Phobia" comes from a Greek deity.

Phobos was the son of Aries, the deity of battle in Greece. He was terrifying, the warriors would paint his face on their shield to intimidate them and drive them fleeing in terror.

1786 – Phobia was described as "a fear of an imagined threat, or an excessive fear of a true one."

Late 1800's-Categories were created for phobias.

1885-Sigmund Freud is researching Phobias.

1947 – Phobia is a distinct medical group in the International Classification of Diseases.

The 1960s – Phobias was classified into three categories: agoraphobia, physical phobia, and unique phobias.

These phobias are very basic and constrained. For eg, an individual may either fear spiders: arachnophobia or cats: ailurophobia. In this situation, the individual lives fairly free of anxiety by ignoring what he or she fears. Any phobias create issues in a large range of environments or circumstances. For eg, signs of acrophobia: fear of height may be caused by gazing out the window. The terror in enclosed spaces: claustrophobia may be caused by sitting in the elevator or by using a tiny bathroom.

People with such phobias can need to drastically alter their lives. In serious cases, a phobia can determine housing, employment, transportation, leisure, and social events, or the home climate.

Phobias may be classified into common phobias, verbal phobias, and agoraphobia. Specific phobic forms include concerns involving other species, conditions in the natural world, blood or injuries, and unusual circumstances.

The most popular is fear of insects, fear of snakes, and fear of heights. Occasionally, adverse contact with the entity or circumstance is caused. Social phobia occurs where a circumstance occurs dreaded because an individual is concerned about others to assess. Agoraphobia occurs where there is apprehension in a circumstance, as it is thought that avoidance will not be feasible.

It is advised that severe phobias be handled with exposure therapy where the subject is exposed to the condition or event in question before the anxiety is overcome. Medications are not effective with this form of phobia. Verbal phobia and agoraphobia are sometimes handled by a mixture of therapy and medicine. Medications used include opioids, benzodiazepines, or beta-blockers.

Types

1. General phobia: In this most prevalent type of phobia, individuals may fear particular animals such as dogs, cats, spiders, snakes, persons such as clowns, dentists, physicians, conditions such as dark rooms, thunderstorms, high places or circumstances such as traveling in a plane, riding on a train, being in a small room. Both disorders are at least partially hereditary or inherited and tend to be more prevalent in households.
2. Environmental anxiety disorder (formerly defined as "social phobia"): Individuals with social anxiety disorder avoid social environments where they may be insulted, ashamed, or criticized by others. If new individuals are interested, they are especially nervous. Fear can be restricted to results, such as seminars, concerts, or company presentations. Or it can be more abstract in such a manner that a phobic individual prevents certain social interactions, such as dining in public or using a public bathroom. Individuals who have been nervous or depressed as infants, or who have a background of unpleasant or adverse social interactions in youth, are more prone to have this condition.
3. Agoraphobia: Agoraphobia is a dislike of being in public areas where a rapid escape will be challenging or humiliating. An individual with agoraphobia may avoid going to a movie or a concert or a bus or a subway. Many individuals with agoraphobia may experience signs of distress or panic disorder that include extreme anxiety and unpleasant physical symptoms, such as shaking, heart palpitations, and sweating.

Childhood phobias arise more often during the ages of 5-9 and appear to last a brief period. Many longer-lasting phobias begin later in life, particularly in people in their 20s. Adult phobias appear to linger for several years and are not likely to go away on their own until they are handled. Phobia may increase the risk of other forms of psychiatric disease in adults, particularly other anxiety disorders, depression, and drug abuse.

Causes

The nature of a particular phobia may be defined by a number of variables. Behavioral, cognitive, and social learning and conditioning theories, psychodynamic models such as Freud's psychoanalytic theory, brain physiology research, family history and genetic predisposition, variations in socio-cultural patterns, and trauma theories that affect the development of particular phobia disorders. Some authors believe that biological studies have overlooked common phobias because pharmacological therapy is not the medication of choice for this condition.

1. The Debilitating Cause: The determinant of common phobias involves pain. For starters, persons who have been bitten by a dog can acquire a particular phobia condition and are susceptible to dog fear. Individuals who experience someone undergoing distress (the others are "modeling" actions for the individual that may be affected) may become predisposed to having a similar phobia condition.
2. Psychodynamic Cause: Psychodynamic scholars clarify that fears develop since people have driving forces that are unsatisfactory, and they curb these motivations. More particularly, Freud proposed that fears rise since of an uncertain oedipal struggle. Agreeing to Freud's hypothesis, Oedipal strife may be a formative struggle that develops amid the third (or oedipal) organization of Freud's psychosexual improvement stages. Amid this organize, a struggle rises with respect to the set of three of father, mother, and child. The struggle concerns the sexual motivations that the child has toward the parent of the inverse sexual orientation and the unfriendly motivations that the child has towards the parent of the same sex. Amid this organize, the formative struggle concerns a determination of oedipal issues. 
3. Physiological Cause: Some work also proposed that the elevated stimulation of brain circuits that lead to the perceptual and emotional elements of fear physically predisposes individuals to particular phobias.
4. Genetics & Community Cause: While common phobias are mostly related to behavioral factors such as simulation, interaction learning, and constructive feedback, genetic predisposition may affect this condition.
5. Socio-cultural Cause: There is no detail on ethnic variations in common phobias. The nature of Phobia can differ by community. Awareness of phobic stimuli, such as illusions or ghosts, found in a variety of societies, is identified as a serious phobia even if the anxiety is severe within a given community and if the apprehension induces significant discomfort or interferes with its working.
6. Genetic and environmental influences may induce phobias: Kids who have a close family with anxiety illness are at risk of having phobias. Distressing incidents, such as close drowning, may contribute to phobia. Exposure to enclosed areas, high heights, and animal or bug bites may also be a cause of the phobia.

Individuals with chronic medical problems or worries over their safety also experience phobias. There is a large rate of individuals experiencing phobias following severe brain injury. Substance misuse and stress are also related to phobias. Phobias have distinct effects than extreme psychiatric disorders such as paranoia. People experience sensory and auditory disturbances, delusions, anxiety, adverse signs such as anhedonia, and disorganized symptoms of schizophrenia. Phobias may be unfounded, but phobias may not struggle to check the truth.

Symptoms

DSM-IV - TR lays out seven screening requirements regarding common phobias:

Important and lasting fear of a phobic stimulus: patients with a particular phobia show marked and lasting fear when they experience a given circumstance or event, a phobic stimulus.

1. Good Anxiety Reaction to a Phobic Stimuli: Patients with a particular Phobic Stimuli show fear as soon as they encounter a Phobic Stimulus. When faced with phobic stimuli, a given circumstance or event, patients with a particular phobia can encounter a panic attack due to a specific circumstance. Children can weep, cling, freeze, or show tantrums when they demonstrate fear in the face of a phobic stimulus.
2. Recognition: While teenagers and adults understand that their anxiety is unreasonably and disproportionate to the circumstance, children may not know that their anxiety is unreasonable.
3. PUBLIC Avoidance: People with a particular phobia avoid a phobic experience or of intense depression and fear.
4. PARTICULAR Impairment and anxiety: People with clear phobias of control, discomfort, and nervous excitement as they experience a phobic stimulus. Their avoidance responses conflict with their day-to-day life or show severe frustration at developing a phobia.
5. Duration: In order to treat a serious phobia in an individual under the age of 18 years, the length of the condition must be at least six months.
6. Not compensated for by another disorder: A diagnosis of particular phobia is given where such conditions are not best compensated for through phobia avoidance, panic symptoms, or fear correlated with a specified condition or entity.

Diagnosis and Treatments

Fears of particular conditions or items are normal, the treatment of a serious phobia is dependent on a reasonable degree of disability. This is advised that the words depression and disability take into consideration the context of the individual condition during treatment.

The DSM-IV - TR notes that if the expected trigger, whether an entity or a social condition, is absolutely missing from the world, a diagnosis can not be made. An indication of this scenario will be an adult who is afraid of mice but resides in an environment without mice. While the idea of mice induces pronounced anxiety and disability within the person since the person does not normally see mice, no real pain or injury has ever been encountered. It is advised that proximity to, and willingness to avoid, stimuli should also be remembered.

When the phobic individual encounters the expected stimuli, the extent of distress rises, and the degree to which he or she perceives that he or she can flee from the stimulation determines the severity of fear in circumstances such as riding an elevator, e.g. apprehension peaks at the halfway point between the floors and reduces as the floor is reached and the doors open.

Cognitive-compartmental treatment

Cognitive-behavioral counseling (CBT) is the most widely prescribed medication for phobias. It includes access to a source of anxiety in a safe environment. This therapy will decondition people and reduce their anxiety.

Medicines

Antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications may help to relieve the discomfort of mental and physical reactions. A mixture of medicine and skilled counseling is always the most effective.

Orderly Desensitization 

A strategy utilized within the treatment of fear is orderly desensitization, a handle in which the individuals looking for offer assistance gradually gotten to be acclimated to their fear, and eventually overcome it. Conventional precise desensitization includes an individual being uncovered to the question they are perplexed of extra minutes so that the fear and distress don't get to be overpowering. This controlled presentation to the anxiety-provoking jolt is key to the adequacy of presentation treatment within the treatment of particular fears. It has appeared that humor is a fabulous elective when conventional efficient desensitization is incapable. Humor precise desensitization includes an arrangement of treatment exercises that comprise of exercises that inspire humor with the dreaded protest.

Therapy in Virtual Reality

Virtual reality therapy is another tool that lets phobias face a dreaded target. It utilizes augmented reality to construct scenarios that would not have been feasible or ethical in the actual universe. This has some benefits over systemic desensitization treatment. Individuals can monitor the scenes and get more visibility than they would really do. Virtual reality is more immersive than merely imaging a scene — the rehabilitation takes place in a private space and the procedure is successful.

Hypnotherapy

Hypnotherapy can be used on its own and in combination with systemic desensitization to overcome phobias. The root source of phobia can be discovered by hypnotherapy. Phobia can be triggered by a past occurrence not recalled by a human, a condition known as repression. The subconscious suppresses painful memories from the conscious mind before the individual is able to cope with them. 

Behavior Therapy

Behavior counseling is also effective in the diagnosis of phobias. During such treatment, the phobic client is slowly introduced to the anxiety-provoking stimulus or circumstance in a regulated way until he finally begins to experience anxiety, recognizing that his frightening perceptions of the scenario remain unfulfilled. Throughout this sense, the clear associative ties between the expected scenario, the person's history of distress, and his resulting avoidance of the circumstance are disrupted and are substituted by a less-maladaptive series of reactions. Psychotherapy can also be effective in the diagnosis of phobias.

Therapy in Group

There is no literature on community counseling with particular phobia conditions. Several reports indicate that community counseling has been successful for dental and spider phobias.

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