Phobias: when the fear wastes your life

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Today, one hears to speak frequently of phobia. But that covers this word entered in the current language precisely? Because of the simple fear felt in a situation a little difficult to the irrational aversion, a gulf exists.

Since our youngest age, the fear is part of our life. The fear of the black, some animals or unknowns is often normal and same necessary: it permits to become aware of the dangers and acts as indispensable alarm to the survival. All along our life, we learn to manage it and to surmount it. But when the fear becomes unverifiable and sickly, when it handicaps the daily life, one speaks of phobia.

The American psychiatric association counts 6 456 distinct phobias: of the most current as the arachnophobie (fear of the spiders) to the rarest as the apopathodiaphulatophobie (fear of the constipation).

Simple phobias

As all phobias, the simple phobias are fears ungrounded objective but, the most often, non handicapping in the daily life (fear of the snakes, enclosed places, obscurity, emptiness.). Present among a lot of subjects, these unrests are not considered like pathological that if they provoke a change of the life quality or a suffering. Because one is often able very well to live with, while adopting behaviors of loop line (restriction of journeys, staircase rather than elevator, permanent night-light home.). Of this type of phobias would suffer about 7% of the population.

The hell, it is the other

The social phobias and agoraphobia are the most bothersome. The first is characterized in public by an irrational fear of the situations (fear to speak, to blush, to tremble or to stutter). It is the fear of the judgment of others, it is often mingled to the feeling not to be worth anything, to a bad esteem of oneself.

Agoraphobia (fear of the discovered spaces or populated too much, fear to be far from at home and to have an uneasiness or a crisis of panic) prevents, her also, to live, to leave and to communicate. These two serious pathologies can drive, due to a lack of treatment adapted, to a social isolation, to a depression, or to bring the one that suffers some to behaviors "from dangerous autothérapie" (excessive consumption of alcohol or of calming to escape the fear) that can drag a state of dependence of the patient.

The social phobias would touch 13 to 14% of the population and the agoraphobia of 1 to 2%.

A particular shape of phobia: the JUNK

Contrary to the "plain" phobic person who is afraid facing a prompt danger, the person who endures JUNK (obsessional trouble of the behavior) is obsessed, constantly and by anticipation, to "the idea" of some intolerable situations (to be dirty, not to be in security.) and multiply repetitive ritual gestures to calm his anguish. These obsessions impose themselves to the patient against its will, even though he finds them absurd. About 2 to 3% of the population suffer some and 15% of this JUNK are associated of the panic attacks.

Can one heal a phobia?

It is at a time the obstinate character of the fear and the conducts of loop lines of the situations to risk that determine the diagnosis of the phobias.

The treatments essentially consist in therapies cognito-comportementales. More than 500 therapists that take care of the unrests of the anxiety exist in France. to make disappear a phobia, it is necessary to face his fear, in a very soft and very progressive manner. it exists for it of the techniques of management of the anxiety, relaxation and exhibition to the agonizing situations. A psychotherapy will be able to come with them. With regard to the JUNK, a medicinal treatment (antidepressants) partner to a psychotherapy will be considered.

The phobia, a hereditary phenomenon?

On present hour, one doesn't have serious survey going in this sense. One knows however that, according to the Dr Christophe Andre "if one doesn't transmit a phobia to his child, one probably transmits him a sort of emotional vulnerability." The behavior of the setting remains, in this type of trouble, determining. Besides, at the time of a treatment, confirm the Dr Jacques Leveau, psychiatrist, "it is necessary that the setting is a co-therapist."

2009-04-03