Fear Not!

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It's not easy moving through the world when you're terrified of electricity. "Donna," 45, a writer, knows that better than most. Get her in the vicinity of an appliance or a light switch or — all but unthinkable — a thunderstorm, and she is overcome by a terror so blinding she can think of nothing but fleeing. That, of course, is not always possible, so over time, Donna has come up with other answers. When she opens the refrigerator door, rubber-soled shoes are a must. If a light bulb blows, she will tolerate the dark until someone else changes it for her. Clothes shopping is done only when necessary, lest static on garments send her running from the store. And swimming at night is absolutely out of the question, lest underwater lights electrocute her. When there's a possibility that lightning may strike, she simply shuts off everything in her house and sits alone in a darkened room until the danger passes.

There is a word — a decidedly straightforward one — for Donna's very extreme condition: electrophobia, or a morbid fear of electricity. You will find it listed right below eisoptrophobia (fear of mirrors) and not far above enetophobia, eosophobia and erythrophobia (fear of pins, daylight and blushing, respectively). And those are just some of the Es.

For every phobia the infinitely inventive — and infinitely fearful — human mind can create, there is a word that has been coined to describe it. There's nephophobia, or fear of clouds, and coulrophobia, the fear of clowns. There's kathisophobia, fear of sitting, and kyphophobia, fear of stooping. There are xanthophobia, leukophobia and chromophobia, fear of yellow, white and colors in general. There are alektorophobia and apiphobia, fear of chickens and bees. And deep in the list, lost in the Ls, there's lutraphobia, or fear of otters — a fear that's useful, it would seem, only if you happen to be a mollusk.

The list of identified phobias is lengthening every day and is now, of course, collected online at www.phobialist.com, where more than 500 increasingly quirky human fears are labeled, sometimes humorously, and catalogued alphabetically. Some have more to do with neology than psychology. (It's one thing to invent a word like arachibutyrophobia, another thing to find someone who's really afraid of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth.) Other phobias, however — like acrophobia (fear of heights), claustrophobia (fear of enclosed spaces) and agoraphobia (a paralyzing terror of anything outside the safety of the home) — can be deadly serious business.

If the names of phobias can be found online, the people who actually suffer from at least one of them at some point in their life are everywhere. For most people, though, dealing with phobias has been a cope-as-you-go business: Sylvie, a Belgian teacher with what she deems a "ridiculous" fear of frogs, just stays out of her basement, and many fearful flyers steel themselves with preflight cocktails.

But such home-brew tactics are usually only stopgaps at best. Happily, safe and lasting phobia treatments are now at hand. In an era in which more and more emotional disorders are falling before the scythe of science, phobias are among the disorders that are falling fastest. Just ask Nathalie, 35, an intensive care nurse near the Belgian city of Charleroi, who finally got the help she needed to conquer her debilitating hemophobia. "It's important that people with phobias know they can be taken care of," she says. "A nurse who faints at the sight of blood doesn't do anyone any good."

Researchers are making enormous progress in determining what phobias are, what kinds of neurochemical storms they trigger in the brain and for what evolutionary purpose the potential for such psychic squalls was encoded into us. With this understanding has come a range of treatments: exposure therapy that can stomp out a lifetime phobia in a single six-hour session; virtual-reality programs that can safely simulate the thing the phobic most fears, slowly stripping it of its power to terrorize; new medications that can snuff the brain's phobic spark before it can catch.

In the past year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first drug — an existing antidepressant called Paxil — specifically for the treatment of social phobias. "There's been nothing like this in the field of mental health," says psychologist David H. Barlow, director of the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders at Boston University. "In the past few years, we've had a complete turnaround in the treatment of phobic disorders."

Considering that phobias can cause so much suffering, it's remarkable how many people lay claim to having one — and how many of them are wrong. Self-described computer phobics are probably nothing of the kind. They may not care for the infernal machines and may occasionally want to throw one out the window, but that's not the same as a full-fledged phobia. Self-described claustrophobics often misdiagnose as well. The middle seat on a transatlantic flight may be something you approach with dismay, but unless you also experience a racing heart and ragged breath, you are probably not phobic. Drawing the distinction between distaste and the singular terror of a phobia is not always easy — and it's made all the harder by the fact that fear in some circumstances is perfectly appropriate. If flying into a storm or easing into weaving traffic isn't the right time to go a little white-knuckled, what is?

Experts, however, say a true phobic reaction is a whole different category of terror...