Finding The Wimp Factor
Phobias are often embarrassing, sometimes debilitating problems. These panic-producing, apparently unreasonable fears have interested me for a long time, if only because I suffer---more properly, suffered---from one. I can use the past tense, because mine is fairly well beaten down.
Apparently that's not unusual with the so-called simple phobias. According to the British publication New Scientist, which recently published a review of the present state of knowledge about phobias, some simple phobias such as fear of a certain kind of animal usually start in childhood. Others (panic at the sight of blood, for example) can start later, even into early adulthood. Women are more likely than men to experience simple phobias, and such phobias can persist for years.
Complex phobias are harder to deal with. Agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces and public places, typically appears in women between the ages of 18 and 28. Social phobia, a catch-all term for fear of situations in which the sufferer might be watched by others, usually shows up in men between the ages of 11 and 16. Of whatever age and gender, people suffering from bad cases of these complex phobias may find themselves becoming virtual prisoners in their own homes.
Theories abound about what causes phobias. Everyone---including me---knew why I was terrified of spiders when I was very young. I was a wimp. Never mind my tomboyish, even foolhardy behavior in other matters: only a true lily-livered, chickenhearted coward would turn to jelly at the sight of a little eight-legged scuttler, and so therefore I was judged cowardly by my peers and myself. This is still the popular assessment of phobics, who are forever being exhorted to get a grip on themselves and shape up. But scientific assessments are another matter.
One scientific view is that simple phobias arise because of some unpleasant experience. The classic illustration was a nasty experiment performed in the 1920s. A little boy was given a fuzzy toy rabbit to play with. When the boy was happily playing, the researcher sneaked up behind him and hit a gong. The traumatized boy avoided fuzzy rabbits thereafter.
A more recent school of thought holds that phobics merely need to moderate an excessive response to a potentially genuine threat. This view, championed by psychiatrists Isaac Marks and Randolfe Nesse among others, suggests that the anxiety system developed as a result of natural selection and that even phobias could offer evolutionary advantage. Someone who freezes up on confronting a sudden drop, for example, is reducing the chance of falling off. Marks and Nesse also point out that fear of blood, unlike other phobias, makes blood pressure drop. Lowered blood pressure could mean less blood loss from a wound, and if one fainted because of the lowered blood pressure, the lack of movement might cause predators to lose interest.
Some evidence indicates that panic attacks run in families, which points to a genetic connection and thus offers at least some support to the evolutionary argument. How the genetic directive works to produce a phobia is far from clear, though. Half the agoraphobic women in one study lost their phobias while they were pregnant, which suggests that one of the many hormonal changes taking place during pregnancy triggered shifts in the women's brains. Another study showed a strong link between the reading disability known as dyslexia and phobias; the researcher hypothesized that a defect in the inner ear was the common cause of both problems. A team of British researchers is even working on the possible role of fluorescent lighting in agoraphobia.
So phobics aren't simply wimps. Better, most phobias can be eased. Antianxiety drugs, psychotherapies, and desensitization procedures are getting steadily better. Sometimes we phobics even desensitize ourselves. I now find spiders interesting animals---though a public-TV special on the love life of tarantulas still does give me a yen to watch instead a rerun of "Murder, She Wrote."
