What Is the Most Common Treatment for Agoraphobia?

Phobia: A neurosis with horror symptoms as its main clinical manifestation.

Chinese name: phobia
Foreign name: phobia

Applied discipline: psychology
Application range: Clinical and Counseling Psychology

Phobia diagnostic criteria

Phobia is a neurosis whose main clinical manifestation is phobia. It means to have unbearable fear and nervousness about a specific person, thing or scene. There are several criteria for judging phobias.

1. Certain subjects can cause strong fear or anxiety, and try to avoid it. Patients recognize that this avoidance response is unreasonable or unnecessary, but cannot get rid of it.

2. Good self-knowledge and require treatment.

3, hinder the normal work, study or daily life.

4. The course of disease can be long or short, and the course of study is at least 3 months.

5, exclude schizophrenia, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and fear symptoms associated with other mental and physical diseases. ^[1]

Phobia

The core symptom of phobia is fear and tension, and severe anxiety or even panic caused by terror. Depending on the target of the terrorist, it can be divided into the following types:

1. Social phobia

It is mainly the immediate and uncontrollable inducing of immediate onset of anxiety in social situations, and the persistent and obvious fear and avoidance of social scenes. The specific manifestation is that the patient is afraid of embarrassing expression, shivering, blushing, sweating or clumsy behavior, helplessness, and fear of attracting the attention of others on the occasion of someone or being noticed. Therefore, avoid social situations that induce anxiety, dare not sit and eat with other people in restaurants, and be afraid to get close to people, especially avoid talking with others. Crimson horror is more common. Patients feel shy, blushed, embarrassed, awkward, and slow as long as they are in public, fearing to become the object of people's smirk. Some patients are afraid to look into other people's eyes and meet other people's eyes. This is called horror.

Specific phobias

A specific phobia is a strong, unreasonable fear or aversion to a specific object or highly specific situation. Frequent in childhood. Typical specific fears are fear of animals (such as spiders, snakes), natural environments (such as storms), blood, injections, or highly specific situations (such as high altitudes, confined spaces, flying). Patients may have evasive behavior as a result.

3. Fear of places

Not only afraid of open spaces, but also anxiety about being unable to leave quickly in crowded places, or being unable to ask for help. The key feature of the horror situation in the place is that there are no exits available immediately, so patients often avoid these situations or need family members, relatives and friends to accompany them.

Causes of Phobia

Genetic factors of phobia

Slater et al. (1977) reported that among the first-degree relatives of patients, 20% of parents and 10% of sibs had neurosis, and thought that genetic factors may be related to the onset of disease. makes an important impact.

Psychiatric factors

It often plays a more important role in the onset of illness. For example, when someone encounters a car accident, they have a fear of riding a car. It may be that a certain situation happens on the background of anxiety, or acute anxiety occurs in a situation The fear of this happened and it became a target of terror.

Phobia environmental factors

The horror of special objects may be related to parents' education, environmental impact, and personal experience (such as being bitten by dogs and being afraid of dogs). The role of conditioned reflexes and learning mechanisms in the occurrence of this disease is a more convincing explanation.

Phobia character

Pre-illness tends to be naive, timid, shy, dependent and introverted.

Phobia treatment

Phobia medication

To reduce stress, anxiety or panic attacks, benzodiazepines and / or antidepressants can be selected, such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, tricyclic antidepressants, and the like.

Phobia psychotherapy

Psychotherapy is an important method to treat the disease. Commonly used are:

(1) Behavior therapy includes systematic desensitization therapy, exposure therapy, etc., which is the most important method for treating specific phobias. Its principles include: one is to eliminate the conditional connection between the object of fear and the reaction to anxiety and fear; the other is to resist the avoidance response.

(2) Cognitive-behavioral therapy Cognitive-behavioral therapy is the first choice for treating phobia. Previous behavioral therapies have emphasized observable behaviors, and their long-term effects are not very satisfactory. Cognitive-behavioral therapy, while adjusting the patient's behavior, emphasizes the adjustment of the patient's unreasonable cognition, which has a better effect. Especially for patients with social phobia, their distorted beliefs and information processing process make the symptoms persist. Correcting these distorted cognitive models is a very important content in the treatment.

(3) Social skills training Patients with social phobia often have social skills deficiency or underestimate their social skills, so they can improve their symptoms through training for a certain period of time. Including: the role of therapist's demonstration, social reinforcement, exposed work exercises, self-affirmation training, etc. ^[2]