Phobia Relief

In this article, Ferris Robinson writes how she overcomes her fear of needles enough to donate blood for an important cause.

Excerpt…

Life With Ferris: The Courage Of Lana Beth
by Ferris Robinson
The Chattanoogan.com

I don’t like needles. I can’t even stand to get my finger pricked. I never watch the nurse jab my poor fingertip and have to turn my head away like a little girl. I am even worse at the idea of a shot. I suppose this fear of needles is the reason I have never given blood. I am great at making excuses…

But I did give blood last week because Lana Beth Webster inspired me to do so…

She didn’t know that I am even more terrified of dogs than I am of getting shots. But I put myself between the dog and her and hollered at it like all I ever wanted to do was kick the daylights out of a growling, long-fanged dog…

Read the full article

Of phobias and isms and other new suffix wars
By William Safire
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE

Phobia, which means “fear of,” was doing fine as a medical term until recently. “Phobias are irrational fears,” says Elaine Rodino, a psychologist in Santa Monica, California. “They are not just `sort of fears;’ they are full and intense and uncontrollable.” An anxiety psychologist in Chicago, David Carbonell, says that “the clinical term phobia is not doing well. Often it’s appended to another word to indicate a wide range of dislikes that may have nothing to do with the core meaning of avoidance as a response to powerful fear. I just fielded a request for an interview on `nudophobia.’”

These range from Islamophobe to Christophobe, both of which were used in the Oct. 23, 1997, edition of the Independent in London. They include Dean-o-phobe in a 2003 New Republic article, when Jonathan Chait confessed, “It’s not entirely clear to me why I’ve taken such an intense dislike to Howard Dean.”

Today’s negative connotation of the suffix -phobia (the ailment) or -phobe (the person) comes from the political-social accusation of homophobia. The original meaning, according to the OED, is “fear of men, or aversion towards the male sex.” Chambers’ Journal in 1920 wrote of a woman whose “salient characteristic was a contempt for the male sex represented in the human biped … The seeds of homophobia had been sown early.”

Many doctors take umbrage at the general use of their suffix in words like Francophobe for “one who calls French fries `freedom fries;’” they don’t like the way it dilutes the scientific seriousness of the term about an irrational fear. But professions don’t own their words. Mathematicians also gripe about the theft of their beloved parameters, to no avail; common usage has a way of snatching a specific word or suffix to do more general semantic work.

Are Social Anxiety Disorder Patients Avoiding Doctors?

Patients with social anxiety disorder are less likely to visit their primary care doctors than people with other psychiatric disorders like depression.

patients with social anxiety disorder made only four visits per year to their primary care physician, compared with nearly seven visits a year for other psychiatric patients and six visits for well patients.

Patients with the disorder were also significantly more likely to abuse alcohol and drugs than other psychiatric patients, Dr. Raz Gross and colleagues at Columbia University found.

“Patients might be self-medicating…using alcohol as a social lubricant,” Gross says. She notes that certain components of substance abuse treatment such as Alcoholics Anonymous, with their emphasis on group discussion and public speaking, are unlikely to attract these patients.

“Physicians in primary care and general medical settings should be aware of the possibility that patients with SAD are avoiding regular medical care,” Gross says.