Specific Phobia 1 Essays - Phobias, Psychiatry, Psychology

Specific Phobia 1 Specific Phobia Kayliegh Klitz Boylan High School Specific Phobia 2 There are three different categories that phobias fit into. Social phobia , which is the fear of coming into contact with people and having to talk to them. Panic disor ders, where a person experiences a paralyzing fear for no reason at all. Lastly, specific phobia, which is a specific fear of any object or place. Out of the three categories the easiest to understand and treat is specific phobia. Each specific phobia can be fit into one of four categories which are the fear of insects and animals, natural environments, blood or injury, and dangerous situations. It is normal to have fears of certain things, but when it starts to get in the way of everyday life is when it becomes a problem. Many people claim to have a specific phobia of some kind but are usually wrong. Four requirements must be met to prove you have a phobia: maladaptive, unjustifiable, disturbing, and atypical. Maladaptive can be hurting oneself or others, unjustifiable means there is no reason for the fear, disturbing is when it bothers others, and atypical violates a norm because it is so different. T o overcome a phobia a person can go through exposure therapy, use virtual-reality programs, or use medications. The most common of the three is exposure therapy. The way exposure therapy works is a patient exposed slowly to the object or situation that is feared. When the patient becomes to overwhelmed a psychiatrist will have the patient perform a relaxing exercise, which is going to their "happy place" or doing something that they love. Virtual-reality programs is exposing the patient to the fear safely and slowly the patient will stop fearing it. Medications are used to help a person stop thinking and forget about their fear before it gets out of control. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration have recently approved an anti-depressant drug, Paxil, this is the first drug approved for phobias. Anxiety Disorders Association of America holds seminars to help people get over their phobias and spot them in children.