Conquering Our Phobias
The biological underpinnings of paralyzing fears
High places should be easy to avoid. There is no compelling reason to climb a tree, for example, or to ride a roller coaster. But somehow, when Beth Cox was driving her daughter from their Atlanta home to Oklahoma two years ago, she found herself crossing the Mississippi River, over the truly terrifying Hernando de Soto Bridge in Memphis. "I started hyperventilating. I started going hysterical. I thought we were going to die," she recalls, describing the experience with rueful humor and lingering embarrassment.
Not that her reaction came as a complete surprise. Indeed, it was unhappily familiar. Cox is, by her own description, "fearless" in all other parts of her life. A beloved reading and math teacher in a suburban Atlanta elementary school, she projects the calm competence of the woman you would immediately turn to in a crisis. So her fear of heights seems incongruous. But for most of her 51 years, especially after she had children, acrophobia (as it's technically known) has been the uninvited guest at too many events in her life. On a family vacation on Pikes Peak four years ago, her husband and two teenage daughters stood outside, exhilarated by the panoramic view, while Cox huddled in the back seat of their rental car, hyperventilating, crying, and trembling.
Cox is one of approximately 14.8 million American adults who suffer from irrational fears of a particular situation, object, or experience. Today, anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in the United States, afflicting 13.3 percent of adults. And the nature of these disorders seems to reflect the landscape of worry and stress of 21st-century life: Overdue bills and Code Orange terrorism alerts merely top the list of worries stressing people out. But for some people, they trigger or fuel a host of anxiety disorders. Obsessive-compulsive disorder, for example, in which men and women become enslaved to elaborate and sometimes painful rituals: Hands are washed until they are raw and bleeding; pockets are jammed with tiny talismans that seem to be essential for life itself; food cannot be eaten unless a specific place setting is arranged in a precise way. After 9/11, post-traumatic stress disorder seemed to become as common as the cold in day care, with flashbacks, bad dreams, and sleepless nights afflicting thousands and thousands of people. Then there are phobias, like social phobia, where a conversation with a neighbor can cause a paralyzing sense of dread, or specific phobias like Beth Cox's acrophobia. Agoraphobia translates literally as fear of the marketplace (which today might be called fear of the mall). Some who suffer from agoraphobia panic when they're in public places; others simply become paralyzed, unable to leave their homes.
Like many psychiatric disorders, anxiety disorders in general, and phobias in particular, vary wildly in degree. Some phobias are so mild they could hardly be considered real psychiatric disorders. As Emory University psychiatrist Charles Nemeroff puts it, "Very few people actually seek treatment for them. It's not as if people who are terrified of snakes come into my office because it is the only thing standing in the way of a career as a herpetologist." Other phobias, however, can dominate people's lives. One woman, who suffered from agoraphobia, refused to leave her house for 18 years. A New York man who suffered from panic disorder ran off the Staten Island Ferry moments before it left the dock, never to get back on it again. A teenager in New Jersey with social phobia missed months of school because of wild fears that she might vomit or blush uncontrollably.
advertisement
