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Phobias are the most common form of anxiety disorder. An American study by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) found that between 5.1 and 21.5 percent of Americans suffer from phobias. Broken down by age and gender, the study found that phobias were the most common mental illness among women in all age groups and the second most common illness among men older than 25.
Most psychologists and psychiatrists divide phobias into three categories:
Many specific phobias, such as fears of dogs, heights, spider bites, and so forth, are extensions of fears that everyone has. People with these phobias treat them by avoiding the thing they fear.
Many specific phobias can be traced back to a specific triggering event, usually a traumatic experience at an early age. Social phobias and agoraphobia have more complex causes that are not entirely known at this time. It is believed that heredity, genetics and brain-chemistry combine with life-experiences to play a major role in the development of anxiety disorders and phobias.
Phobias vary in severity among individuals, with some phobics simply disliking or avoiding the subject of their fear and suffering mild anxiety. Others suffer fully-fledged panic attacks with all the associated disabling symptoms.
It is possible for a sufferer to become phobic about virtually anything. The name of a phobia generally contains a Greek word for what the patient fears plus the suffixSUF-FIX In linguistics, a suffix is an affix that succeeds the morphemes to which it can attach. Example: establish ( verb) + ment suffix —> establishment ( noun). See derivation). A suffix is also a style at the end of a person's name which gives additio -phobiaThe English suffix phobia is used to describe fear or hatred (the latter is often ignored) of a particular thing or subject. Everyday language has established the use of this suffix as a mild or irrational fear with no serious substance; however, its orig. Creating these terms is something of a word gameWord games can be of several different types: Letter arrangement games, where the goal is to form words out of given letters: Anagrams both a simple game of rearranging letters and a linguistic recreation of making anagrams that seem to illuminate somethi. Few of these terms are found in medical literature.
Common phobias include:
More phobia names are listed in the List of phobias.