Informative speech social anxiety disorder

Phobias

Can you imagine being so afraid of something that it becomes hard to breathe? That your anxiety is so high that you are completely frozen? What if you did not know when you would experience this level of fear which could happen at any time and you live your life trying to avoid it? This is what having a phobia can feel like. According to the National Institute of Health, more than 3.6 million Americans have a phobia of some sort and can live with fear like this every day. Upon learning about other people's phobias, some people can say that they sound irrational and don't make sense, but this is how a phobia can be characterized.

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition there are different types of phobias: social phobias, specific phobias and agoraphobia. Social phobias can be divided into two categories: generalized social phobia and specific social phobia. Generalized social phobia is better known as social anxiety disorder. According to Franklin Schneider 2006, approximately 12% of Americans have social anxiety disorder at some time in their life. This disorder can be explained as the fear of being judged or by doing something embarrassing in public. This disorder may cause sufferers to avoid social situations as much as possible. Specific social phobia is more targeted and can be experienced in social situations with specific triggers such as someone with glossophobia who fears public speaking. Glossophobia is thought to be the most common phobia in America.

The most well known types of phobias are those which fall under the category of specific phobias. These are phobias which cause the sufferer to go out of his or her way to avoid the thing that cause this fear altogether. Specific phobias themselves can be divided into 5 different types: Animal type (such as arachnophobia, a fear of spiders), natural environment type (such as claustrophobia, a fear of confined spaces), situational type (such as acrophobia, a fear of heights), blood/injection/injury type (such as necrophobia, a fear of death) and other. Specific phobias are very common among children between the ages of 7 and 13 and can often been seen as a normal part of the developmental process.

Agoraphpobia is the final kind of phobia noted by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition. Agoraphobia is the fear of open spaces which often leaves the sufferer house-bound for many years, unable to leave the walls of their home for fear of what lies outside of these walls. I have an aunt who suffers from this kind of phobia and rarely leaves her house even though she has nothing to do there and it makes her life very difficult. As we said before, these fears can be completely irrational to those who do not suffer from them.

But how can we diagnose a phobia? One fact is that we cannot diagnose a phobia which shows no symptoms of existing. In other words, unless a person has experienced the thing which they are afraid of and had a bad reaction to it, we can never know if a person has a phobia or not. However, once we have evidence of this phobia, we can check a number of indicators to see if it is indeed a phobia.

· Firstly, the fear must be unreasonable,

· Second, when exposed to the thing that they are afraid of, the sufferer must have an immediate response of anxiety

· Third, the sufferer knows that their fear is unreasonable

· Fourth, the sufferer avoids the situation of the fear at all costs

· Fifth, this fear hinders their normal life.

· Sixth, the thing that the sufferer fears is not feared because of another mental disorder like OCD

Once it is decided that a person does indeed have a phobia, there are a number of ways that one can go about treating it. One treatment is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) which allows patients to analyze their own thoughts and feelings in the situation of fear and aim to recognize that their fear is in fact very irrational and from there, they may be able to lessen this fear. After undergoing this treatment, about 90% of patients show reduced fear or reversed reaction to the original trigger. Other therapies such as hypnotherapy and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing have also been very helpful in aiding sufferers of this disease.

In conclusion, Phobias can alter someone's life drastically and make daily functioning difficult. However, with proper treatment and a little bit of time and patience, phobias too can be overcome.