Human phobia

Human phobia is a topic relevant for discussions, scientific research and medical symposiums of international scale. It is also interesting in the clinical aspect, because until now the medical world has not reached 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 absorb the entire species diversity of these states. According to some data, today doctors face more than 300 types of phobias, according to other information, species and subspecies more than 500.

Phobias of man - this phrase is not accidental, because no representative of fauna, fauna does not suffer from phobias. Animals have a completely natural instinct for self-preservation, and any reaction is adequately responded to any threat. A person can also have usual transient fears, which should not be confused with phobias.

In the clinical sense, the phobia of a person is an obsession that was described back in the 17th century. A century later, these symptoms were combined into a separate disease - "disease of doubt" (folie de doute). Since already in those days, doctors drew attention to the irrationality of such fears and recognized that such conditions are characteristic of the disturbed human consciousness. At the beginning of the last century, the father of the founder of the school of psychoanalysis and fundamental psychiatry, psychotherapy in principle, Sigmund Freud after decades of observation concluded that fears, like human phobias, do not have a specific, specific object. Perhaps it is the uncertainty and fuzziness of the object of fear that causes an unconscious sense of horror, because what you do not know scares the most. The surprising paradoxical combination of critical, sensible attitude to one's illness and impossibility to control it caused at the least the bewilderment of doctors, as a maximum - the desire to consider, study the disease and find ways to treat it.

Today it has become fashionable to call any alarming manifestation of a phobia, although in fact there is a clear differentiation of anxiety and phobia of a person. According to the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10), a phobia is a pathological, intrusive condition that can be of a diffuse (generalized, multi-faceted) or focused state. These phobic states are inadequate to the real danger and do not have an objective, explainable reason. The person understands everything at the level of consciousness, but does not control himself at all, moreover, he is haunted by alarming forebodings long before the meeting, contact with the object or situation provoking a person's phobia.

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Phobias: List

Human phobia is a concept that requires concretization and diagnosis. The definition and separation of alarms and phobias, including their types, is carried out using special techniques, tests. Modern diagnostic applied techniques allow us 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 closed space - claustrophobia; 
• Fear of height at any level - acrophobia; 
• Fear of treatment and medicine in principle - opiofobia, pharmacophobia; 
• Fear of spiders - arachnophobia (as a subspecies of zoophobia); 
• Fear of the audience, speeches - social phobia, glossophobia; 
• Fear of sharp, pricking objects - aychnofobia; 
• Fear of open space - agoraphobia; 
• Fear to swallow food, water - phagophobia; 
• Fear of flying with airplanes - aerophobia

The list of phobias can be continued and each letter of the alphabet has its own phobia, and not one.

Phobias of the person, in what their danger and whether they bear a real threat to health?

Human phobias are not a deadly disease, although its symptoms literally exhaust people and significantly reduce the quality of 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 phobia?

For curating phobic states, getting rid of a person's phobia, modern medicine offers more than 50 effective methods and methods, starting with classical psychoanalysis and ending with neurolinguistic programming. The desensitization method is also effective, when a hierarchy is built and the 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 most succumb to treatment if a complex strategy is built up, which includes both pharmacological drugs and psychotherapeutic methods. Also a good addition to the therapy of phobic conditions can be dietotherapy, physiotherapy, massage.