Human phobias

Human phobias are a topical subject for discussions, scientific research and medical symposiums of international scale. It is also interesting in the clinical aspect, since the medical world has not yet come to an agreement on the etiology of this disease. There are several theories explaining the causes of obsessive fears, but phobias are so diverse that no version can incorporate all the species diversity of these conditions. According to some data, today doctors encounter more than 300 types of phobias, according to other information, there are more than 500 types and subtypes.

Human phobias - this phrase is not accidental, because not a single representative of the fauna, the animal world suffers from phobias. Animals have a completely natural instinct for self-preservation, and any threat is met with an adequate reaction to the situation. A person can also have ordinary transient fears, which should not be confused with phobias.

In the clinical sense, human phobias are an obsessive condition that was described back in the 17th century. A century later, similar symptoms were combined into a separate disease - "disease of doubts" (folie de doute). Since already at that time, doctors paid attention to the irrationality of such fears and recognized that such conditions are characteristic of a disturbed human consciousness. At the beginning of the last century, the founding father of the school of psychoanalysis and fundamental psychiatry, psychotherapy in principle, Sigmund Freud, after decades of observation, concluded that fears, as well as human phobias, do not have a specific, concrete object. Perhaps it is the uncertainty and vagueness of the object of fear that causes an inexplicable feeling of horror, because what you do not know is most frightening. An amazing paradoxical combination of a critical, healthy attitude to one's illness and the inability to control it, on the one hand, caused at least bewilderment among doctors, and at most - a desire to examine, study the disease and find ways to treat it.

Today it has become fashionable to call any anxious manifestation a phobia, although in fact there is a clear differentiation between anxiety and human phobia. According to the international classification of diseases (ICD-10), a phobia is a pathological, obsessive condition that can have the character of a diffuse (generalized, including many aspects) or focused condition. These phobic conditions are inadequate to the real danger and have no objective, explainable cause. A person understands everything at the level of consciousness, but does not control himself at all, moreover, he is haunted by anxious premonitions long before a meeting, contact with an object or situation that provokes a person's phobias.

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Phobias: list

Human phobias are a concept that requires specification and diagnostics. Definition and division of anxieties and phobias, including their types, is carried out using special methods, tests. Modern diagnostic applied methods allow to identify this serious condition and determine its type with very high accuracy. The simplest in the diagnostic sense are simple human phobias. These include the following:

• Fear of enclosed spaces – claustrophobia;
• Fear of heights of any level - acrophobia;
• Fear of treatment and medicine in general – opiophobia, pharmacophobia;
• Fear of spiders – arachnophobia (as a subtype of zoophobia);
• Fear of audiences, public speaking – social phobia, glossophobia;
• Fear of sharp, piercing objects - aichnophobia;
• Fear of open spaces - agoraphobia;
• Fear of swallowing food, water - phagophobia;
• Fear of flying - aerophobia

The list of phobias can be continued and for each letter of the alphabet there is a phobia, and more than one.

Human phobias, what is their danger and do they pose a real threat to health?

Human phobias are not a life-threatening disease, although their symptoms literally exhaust a person and significantly reduce the quality of his life. In addition, clinical manifestations of phobia can activate other pathological processes, for example, with existing hypertension, cardiac diseases.

Is it possible to cure a person's phobias?

To manage phobic conditions and get rid of a person's phobia, modern medicine offers more than 50 effective methods and techniques, starting with classical psychoanalysis and ending with neurolinguistic programming techniques. The desensitization method is also effective, when a hierarchy is built and a person learns to cope with them, starting with the least disturbing. In cases of pathological phobias, drug therapy is used, including antidepressants, neuroleptics, tranquilizers.

Human phobias are most successfully treated if a comprehensive strategy is developed, which includes both pharmacological drugs and psychotherapeutic methods. Diet therapy, physiotherapy procedures, and massage can also be a good addition to the therapy of phobic conditions.