by Sapphire Mason-Brown

Created on: May 04, 2008

A Phobia is an uncontrollable, irrational, and persistent fear of a specific object, situation, or activity. Phobias often result in great panic and anxiety when exposed to the stimulus feared. Different treatments treat different aspedxts of the phobia. Some treatments try to treat the root cause of the phobia, be it faulty thought processes or childhood experiences. Other treatments focus on treating the symptoms of the phobia meaning that the phobia is never really cured.

-Medication-
One of the most common treatments for most things in society today is medication, and why not, it quickly rids people of their problems. The root of many people's phobias is neuro-chemical imbalances; some medications can improve such imbalances. However, some medications are prescribed simply to minimise the symptoms of phobias such as anxiety, This does not cure the phobia, meaning that in some cases medication is not necessarily a treatment.

-Behavioural Therapy-
Behavioural therapy is a form of psychotherapy based largely on the theories of operant conditioning (learning through reinforcement) and classical conditioning (learning through association). Behaviourists believe that all responses, including phobias, are learnt. Behavioural therapy entails un-learning phobias and the behaviour associated with them. The treatment consists of one-on-one sessions with a therapist; these sessions involve slow exposure to the stimulus in question, this should slowly reduce and eventually extinguish the phobia. Behavioural Therapy is a highly effective form of phobia treatment, unfortunately, theses therapy session and the number of sessions need to make a sufficient change are very expensive.

-Cognitive Therapy-
Cognitive approaches focus on the thought process involves when dealing with various situations. Cognitive therapy or cognitive restructuring consists of three steps, assessing the validity of the patients beliefs (i.e how realistic is their fear?), assessing what the patient predicts and investigating their attributions for the causes of events. The therapy would involve changing the patient thoughts about what they fear, this could mean making them aware that a fear of spiders is irrational as they do not live near poisonous spiders and all spiders are less than a 100th of their size.

-Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy-
Cognitive behavioural therapy stems from cognitive and behavioural approaches. It involves identifying the negative thoughts (cognitive processes) that influence behaviours;

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