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The Treatment of Phobias Essay

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Everyone in life has fears, it’s a natural way our brains process certain objects or situations that may be dangerous. Common fears may be heights or spiders; some would rationally go out of their way to avoid these, but this is quite different from having a phobia. A phobia is an irrational distress with a particular object or concept/idea. Although fears are well known now, they do not have to disrupt the lives of those who are living them. Throughout the essay there will be three different treatments with three different phobias in ways to cure a phobia; the first is a trauma-focused treatment approach for travel phobia, assessment and treatment for childhood phobias, and hypnosis in facilitating clinical treatment of injections. …show more content…

When introduced to in vivo exposure the patients showed an increase of PTSD symptoms (Handley, Salkovskis, & Ehlers, 2008). When performing the study 125 people received TF-CBT, and the remaining 59 received ‘EMDR + in vivo exposure’. In results there was a clear sign of reduction in mild travel anxiety with up to 7.3 sessions. Although, there were found that one treatment would be more beneficial than the other in terms of reduction of symptoms of anxiety, depression, PTSD. Overall the signs of Travel Phobia and anxiety were reduced in both methods of treatments giving the researchers plenty of evidence for being successful in a trauma-focused treatment plan.
The study case of children phobia is not like others present before it, this case suggests that that to decrease a phobia is should be multi-method, multi-informant, and developmentally sensitive. Another aspect that differs from others is that it will assess the home-living of children as well as their caregivers. Their study examined predictors of treatment outcome for 106 phobic and anxious youth (aged 6 to 17 years) and their parents. The treatment included trials such as: diagnostic interviewing, fear survey schedules, anxiety questionnaires and behavioral observations. Taking methods from the DSM-IV-C there are separate questionnaires for both parent and child on different phobia types (animal, injection, and environment) on a scale from one to eight of interference. In traditional

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