While the flood of marketing tends to overstate the case, the fact is, Paxil works - not by eliminating anxiety entirely but by controlling it enough for traditional therapy to take hold. And with the pharmacological door now open, makers of similar drugs like Luvox, Prozac and Celexa will probably seek the same certification. "Paxil is not unique among these drugs," says Barlow. "It was just first in line."

Progress in treating social-anxiety disorder is also providing hope for the last - and most disabling - of the family of phobias: panic disorder. Panic disorder is to anxiety conditions what a tornado is to weather conditions: a devastating sneak attack that appears from nowhere, wreaks havoc and then simply vanishes. Unlike the specific phobic and the social phobic who know what will trigger their fear, the victim of panic attacks never knows where or when one will hit. Someone who experiences an attack in, say, a supermarket will often not return there, associating the once neutral place with the traumatic event. But the perceived circle of safety can quickly shrink, until sufferers may be confined entirely to their homes. When this begins to happen, panic disorder mutates into full-blown agoraphobia. "For some people, even the house becomes too big," says Fordham University psychology professor Dean McKay. "They may limit their world to just a few rooms."

The treatment for agoraphobia is much the same as it is for social phobia: cognitive-behavioral therapy and drugs. In many cases, recovery takes longer than it does for social phobias because agoraphobic behavior can become so entrenched. Nonetheless, once therapy and drug treatments get under way, they sometimes move surprisingly quickly. "The best way to treat agoraphobia," says Ost, "is by individual therapy, once a week for 10 or 12 weeks."

If science has so many phobias on the run, does that mean that the problem as a whole can soon be considered solved? Hardly. Like all other emotional disorders, phobias cause a double dip of psychic pain: from the condition and from the shame of having the problem in the first place. Over the years, researchers have made much of the fact that the large majority of phobia sufferers are women - from 55% for social phobias and up to 90% for specific phobias and extreme cases of agoraphobia. Hormones, genes and culture have all been explored as explanations. But the simplest answer may be that women own up to the condition more readily than men do. If you don't come forward with your problem, you can't be included in the epidemiologists' count. Worse, you can never avail yourself of the therapists' cure.

Making things even tougher, phobias are often hard to distinguish from other anxiety disorders. A person who feels compelled to wash or shower dozens of times a day may have a phobic's terror of germs, but a clinician would easily peg the problem as obsessive-compulsive disorder, not a specific phobia. The survivor of an airline crash may exhibit a phobic's panic at even a picture of a plane, but likely as not, the fear is one component of a larger case of post-traumatic stress disorder. Different conditions require different treatments, and without the right care, the problem is unlikely to clear up.

The fact that phobias, of all the anxiety disorders, can be overcome so readily is one of psychology's brightest bits of clinical news in a long time. Phobias can beat the stuffing out of sufferers because the feelings they generate seem so real and the dangers they warn of so great. Most of the time, however, the dangers are mere neurochemical lies - and the lies have to be exposed. "Your instincts tell you to escape or avoid," says Phillipson. "But what you really need to do is face down the fear." When you spend your life in a cautionary crouch, the greatest relief of all may come from simply standing up.

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