What Kylie Jenner and Sylvester Stallone have in common with 10 per cent of us: phobias and why we get them
- More than seven per cent of people suffer from social phobias including agoraphobia and less than one per cent have a fear of spiders
- Most phobias begin in childhood and some can last an entire lifetime without treatment
Mine is about snakes. My daughter, grasshoppers, her godmother, sticky labels. I’m talking phobias. My daughter will flee a room if a grasshopper makes an entrance, her godmother can’t peel the price tag off a gift, an avocado or even a box of tissues. And I’m not just afraid of snakes in slithering, slippery real life: since childhood I’ve been unable to comfortably turn the pages of a book if it meant touching colour pictures of snakes.
Phobia derives from the Greek phobos, which means fear or horror.
The National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, says phobias are the most common mental disorders in the US. Up to 10 per cent of people have specific phobias, for example 7.1 per cent experience phobias with regard to social situations, and 0.9 per cent have agoraphobia – the fear of being out in open or crowded spaces.
Phobias are divided into four main categories: the natural environment (eg fear of water, hydrophobia or thunderstorms, astraphobia); fear of animals (cynophobia, the fear of dogs), fear of medical intervention or injury (particularly limiting is pseudodysphagia or the fear of choking, sometimes confused with phagophobia, the fear of swallowing, both hugely compromising) and situational fears – such as planes or enclosed spaces or a social phobia.