Phobias

This page is about phobic anxiety disorders as a class. Research etc on specific phobias should go on the appropiate page off the link below(if they have no ICD10 number) or off the ICD10 page if they have a number.
 * ICD: Phobic anxiety disorders: list of phobias without ICD10 classification number

Definition
A phobia (from the Greek φόβος "fear"), is a strong, persistent fear of situations, objects, activities, or persons. The main symptom of this disorder is the excessive, unreasonable desire to avoid the feared subject. When the fear is beyond one's control, or if the fear is interfering with daily life, then a diagnosis under one of the anxiety disorders can be made.

Phobias (in the clinical meaning of the term) are the most common form of anxiety disorders. An American study by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) found that between 8.7% and 18.1% of Americans suffer from phobias. Broken down by age and gender, the study found that phobias were the most common mental illness among women in all age groups and the second most common illness among men older than 25.

Phobia is also used in a non-medical sense for aversions of all sorts. These terms are usually constructed with the suffix -phobia. A number of these terms describe negative attitudes or prejudices towards the named subjects. See Non-clinical uses of the term below.

Description
Most psychologists and psychiatrists divide phobias into three categories:

A specific phobia is a generic term for a kind of anxiety disorders that amount to unreasonable or irrational fear or anxiety related with exposure to specific objects or situations. As a result, the affected persons tend to actively avoid these objects or situations.
 * Social phobias - fears involving other people or social situations such as performance anxiety or fears of embarrassment by scrutiny of others, eg. eating in public.
 * Specific phobias - fear of a single specific panic trigger such as spiders, dogs, elevators, flying, catching a specific illness, etc.

The DSM-IV distinguishes the following groups of specific phobias (classification may overlap).
 * Animal type (e.g. arachnophobia, or fear of spiders)
 * Natural environment type (e.g. acrophobia, or fear of heights; fear of storms or lighnings)
 * Situational type (e.g. claustrophobia, or fear of small confined spaces; fear of elevators, of crossing a road)
 * Blood/injection/injury type (e.g. aichmophobia, or fear of injections and needles)
 * Other

The fear or anxiety may be triggered both by presence and the anticipation of the specific object/situation and usually causes a panic attack. In most cases of adults, this kind of phobia is consciously recognized by the person; still, anxiety and avoidance are difficult to control and may significantly impair person's functioning and even physical health (notably in the case of aichmophobia).


 * Agoraphobia - a generalized fear of leaving your home or a small familiar 'safe' area, and of the inevitable panic attacks that will follow. Agoraphobia is the only phobia regularly treated as a medical condition.

In Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV), social phobia, specific phobia, and agoraphobia are sub-groups of anxiety disorder.

Many of the specific phobias, such as fear of dogs, heights, spider bites, and so forth, are extensions of fears that a lot of people have. People with these phobias specifically avoid the thing they fear.

Many specific phobias can be traced back to a specific triggering event, usually a traumatic experience at an early age. Social phobias and agoraphobia have more complex causes that are not entirely known at this time. It is believed that heredity, genetics and brain-chemistry combine with life-experiences to play a major role in the development of anxiety disorders and phobias.

Phobias vary in severity among individuals. Some individuals can simply avoid the subject of their fear and suffer only relatively mild anxiety over that fear. Others suffer fully-fledged panic attacks with all the associated disabling symptoms. Most individuals understand that they are suffering from an irrational fear, but are powerless to override their initial panic reaction.

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Non-clinical uses of the term
A number of neologisms have appeared with the suffix -phobia, in which "phobia" is understood as a negative attitude towards certain categories of people or other things, used in an analogy with the medical usage of the term. Usually these kinds of "phobias" are described as fear, dislike, disapproval, prejudice, hatred, discrimination, or hostility towards the object of the "phobia". Often this attitude is based on prejudices and is a particular case of general xenophobia.

A fear or hatred is not always considered a phobia in the clinical sense because it is believed to be only a symptom of other psychological problems, or the result of ignorance, or of political or social beliefs. In other words, unlike clinical phobias, which are usually qualified with the word "irrational", phobias of attitude usually have roots in social relations.

Below are some of these neologisms:


 * Christianophobia, fear or dislike of Christians
 * Homophobia, fear or dislike of homosexual people
 * Transphobia, fear or dislike of transgender or transsexual people.
 * Xenophobia, fear or dislike of strangers or the unknown, often used to describe nationalistic political beliefs and movements
 * Ephebophobia, irrational fear of adolescents gaining more rights or showing behavioral, emotional or social emancipation

See also List of anti-ethnic and anti-national terms.

Hydrophobia and photophobia
The term hydrophobia, or fear of water, is usually not a psychological condition at all, but another term for the disease rabies, referring to a common symptom. Likewise, photophobia is a physical complaint. Aversion to light due to inflamed eyes or excessively dilated pupils does not necessarily indicate photophobia.