Phobias and potential causes, symptoms, and treatements Essay

Known as a mental disorder a phobia is a persistent fear of a specific object, activity, or situation that leads to compelling desire to avoid it. Phobias tend to affect the way people live their lives, for example, their working and social environments, considering that they last for a very long time and are capable to cause intense psychological physical stress. It is considered today the most common mental and anxiety disorder in the United States (Matig Mavissakalian & David H. Barlow 1981 pp 2). There are many phobias such as: the fear of aging, fear of changing, fear of clowns, fear of getting fat, fear of being in closed spaces, etc.

Everybody that you come into contact with on a daily basis will have a fear of something but a phobia can be defined as an irrational fear, this can provoke feelings of intense anxiety and initiate avoidance behaviour.

The biological explanation for the acquisition of phobic disorders establishes that phobias are caused by genetics, innate influences and the principles of biochemistry. This theory recognizes that an oversensitive fear response may be inherited, causing abnormal levels of anxiety. This is illustrated in the basis of inheritance, particularly the adrenergic theory that convicts that those who have an acquisition to phobic disorders consequently show high levels of arousal in the automatic nervous system, which leads to increased amounts of adrenaline, thus causing high levels of anxiety.

You are in an airport waiting for your plane to arrive. You've never flown before, and are more terrified than you can ever remember being. Everyone has told you the supposedly comforting statistics - "millions of planes take off each day and there's only a handful of crashes," "flying is safer than driving." You know rationally that there is no reason to be so scared, but regardless your heart is racing, your palms are sweating, and you're light-headed. Simply the thought of being up in the air, out of control, makes you feel faint. Finally the flight attendant announces that your plane has arrived. But as all the other passengers line up to get onboard, you grab your luggage and walk straight out of the airport,

Phobias, an extreme fear of something, can best be understood through use of the psychodynamic perspective. Oftentimes, childhood traumas or exposure to the object of the fear at an early age can lead to the phobia to manifest itself when the patient is an adult.

Phobia in clinical psychology context is an irrational fear of something or situation. The person suffering from phobia will try their best to avoid their phobia. In the extreme case that the person suffering from the phobia cannot avoid it, they will attempt to endure through the situation with a lot of distress ADDIN EN.CITE Swanson1986158(Swanson, 1986)15815817Swanson, Guy E.Phobias and Related Symptoms: Some Social SourcesSociological ForumSociological Forum103-130111986Springer08848971http://www.jstor.org/stable/684555( HYPERLINK l "_ENREF_2" o "Swanson, 1986 #158" Swanson, 1986). Phobias can cause difficulties in a person performing their daily activities.

A Phobia is a persistent, abnormal or irrational fear of a specific thing or situation that compels one to avoid the feared stimulus. Phobias are largely underreported. An estimated 6 million people

Fear can also affect your mental and physical health. In Peter Zafirides “How our emotions can affect our decision making ability”. In this article he wrote about a story that a woman told him. It was a story about a trap that put the monkey in a dilemma. The monkey was left with a jar with food inside it and a hole just big enough for its hand to fit in. When the hungry monkey goes to grab the treat the monkey is now left in a dilemma. Due to the small opening it was forced to either let go the treat and starve or hold onto the treat and be trapped. This has a lot to do with fear because many people sometimes don't know how to “let

Phobias are a form of anxiety and a heightened sense of fear. Like fear, but times two or ten depending on how bad it is. There are several different forms of extreme anxiety, but the most common types of phobia is simple and social. These categories consist of phobias that involve objects, insects, or situations

The amygdala is responsible for our emotional memories. Damage to the amygdala could impact us negatively causing us to misinterpret our memories and our emotions related to those memories. What should cause fear and anger could be diminished to a point that could cost you significantly if the amygdala is damaged. For example, if you don’t remember a negative emotion with a certain action in a memory of the past that has impacted you negatively, you might continue to make the same mistakes over and over again. By taking the same actions without causing you any fear and anxiety of loss or damage could cause you major negative effects in your

Transient fears for certain objects or situations are common. However when fear is extreme and disproportionate to the threat posed by specific stimuli that is avoided or endured under duress, it is characterised as a specific phobia (APA, 2013). The common types of specific phobia are animal, e.g., dogs, spiders; natural environment, e.g., water, heights; blood, injection or injury (BII), e.g., dental phobia, medical procedures; situational, e.g., elevators, flying; and other miscellaneous phobias such as clowns, fear of choking. While debilitating, specific phobias are the most treatable of psychiatric disorders, however many people do not seek treatment because of their fear of being confronted with the feared stimuli (Wolitzky-Taylor, Horowitz, Powers & Telch, 2008).

Phobia is the fear or irritation one has towards some things, objects or activities, which results to one totally avoiding them or trip off on sighting them.

Having a phobia is having an anxiety disorder. It's having an irrational fear to any kind of object, a situation, an animal, or anything really, people with phobias will go out of their way to avoid anything that could be related to their horrific fear. Having a phobia or the anxiety can intervene with anybody's daily lives. It can take over your life and have the feeling of your life revolving around your fear. There's the sense of non-stop the thought of the worst possible situation. An anxiety disorder is when you have this constant extreme of worry. You feel almost as if you're trapped constantly stressing, over thinking, and panicking cycle. Anxiety is almost like the extreme butterflies people get when getting up on stage or the feeling

The goal of my first main point is to familiarize everyone will the concept of a phobia, as well as some examples. Richard Kasschau, author of the textbook Understanding Psychology, defines a phobia as, "an intense and irrational fear of a particular object or situation." A phobia is not, however, simply a fear. Being afraid of spiders does not constitute a phobia. On the other hand, not leaving your home for 15 years because you 're afraid of encountering one, does. Phobias are also a type of anxiety disorder, which, according to the article "Anxiety Disorder," is "any of several disorders that are characterized by a feeling of fear, dread, or apprehension that arises without a clear or appropriate cause." They are considered anxiety disorders because many people who suffer from phobic tendencies experience symptoms similar to anxiety attacks. These symptoms include restlessness, stress, insomnia,

However, phobia can even cause people to risk their health. For example, the fear of dentists can leave people suffering from it willing to risk the health of their teeth in order to avoid having to go through an exam or procedure ( MacKay). When one knows about an upcoming confrontation, it can be the reason why one can not sleep or finds it hard to focus on important tasks. Due the change in daily routine, this unrealistic fear can interfere with the ability to socialize, work, or go about everyday life, brought on by and object, event or situation. But even animals have anxieties and phobias just as every human being (www.phobia-help.de). A phobia is an irrational fear, one knows that the object or situation, one is scared off, can not hurt one, but one is still afraid. A reason for this is that the human mind can not distinguish what is real and imaginary. When one has uncontrollable anxiety attacks, he loses rational judgement, leading to complicated problems. However, anyone can develop a phobia, men and women, teens and young adults, and elderly lady or a one-year-old boy (MacKay).