Phobia...

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My name is Chris Prescott. I am a writer of suspense, thriller and horror. While I enjoy writing short stories, novels are what I love best. I read everything that has even the smallest chance of scaring me, I guess because I'm a thrill seeker. I enjoy the way my heart races when I get into a good book or movie, and I revel in the way I startle so easy. I am a very jumpy person who does startle very easy, which is why it bothers me so much that I can't figure out what my phobia is. I have fears aplenty, but these are things I can deal with; spiders and heights and the like, but by my definition, a phobia is something that is not so easily dealt with. "Phobia" is a collection of short stories dedicated to fears that cannot be dealt with. The end result of these stories will certatinly vary. The short story "The Speech" is not about a phobia, but about a fear. What Kevin goes through is an intense discomfort, a near panic attack, but are not the symptoms of a phobia. I throw up when I'm going to give a speech too, but I always end up dealing with it. I haven't decided which phobias will be included in the collection because there are certain fears I want to include, but have been done so many times that the originality is lost. Scary clowns, cemetaries and the like have been done over and over. That doesn't mean I couldn't have fun with them, but...I WANNA BE SCARED TOO! Even if I was afraid of clowns at one point, I'm not anymore, I've grown out of a lot of my fears. I want to be scared silly...and if I can't scare myself than I must be warped.
Evil, Satanic, and Horror pictures
From Wikipedia
Keep in mind that these definitions do vary from place to place...
A phobia (from the Greek "fear"), is an irrational, persistent fear of certain situations, objects, activities, or persons. The main symptom of this disorder is the excessive, unreasonable desire to avoid the feared subject. When the fear is beyond one's control, or if the fear is interfering with daily life, then a diagnosis under one of the anxiety disorders can be made.
It is generally accepted that phobias arise from a combination of external events and internal predispositions. Some phobias such as arachnophobia (fear of spiders) and ophidiophobia (fear of snakes) however, may arise more easily due to an evolutionary trait that conditioned humans to fear certain creatures that could cause them harm. In a famous experiment, Martin Seligman used classical conditioning to establish phobias of snakes and flowers. The results of the experiment showed that it took far fewer shocks to create an adverse response to a picture of a snake than to a picture of a flower, leading to the conclusion that certain objects may have a genetic predisposition to being associated with 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.
Most psychologists and psychiatrists classify most phobias into three categories:
* Social phobias - fears involving other people or social situations such as performance anxiety or fears of embarrassment by scrutiny of others, such as eating in public. Social phobias may be further subdivided into
--the general social phobia, also known as social anxiety disorder, and
--specific social phobias, which are cases of anxiety triggered only in specific situations. The symptoms may extend to psychosomatic manifestation of physical problems. For example, sufferers of paruresis find it difficult or impossible to urinate in reduced levels of privacy. That goes beyond mere preference. If the condition triggers, the person physically cannot empty their bladder.
* Specific phobias - fear of a single specific panic trigger such as spiders, dogs, elevators, water, flying, catching a specific illness, etc.
* Agoraphobia - a generalized fear of leaving home or a small familiar 'safe' area, and of possible panic attacks that might follow. Agoraphobia is the only phobia regularly treated as a medical condition.
According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV), social phobia, specific phobia, and agoraphobia are sub-groups of anxiety disorder.
Many of the specific phobias, such as fear of dogs, heights, spider bites and so forth, are extensions of fears that a lot of people have. People with these phobias specifically avoid the entity they fear.
Phobias vary in severity among individuals. Some individuals can simply avoid the subject of their fear and suffer only relatively mild anxiety over that fear. Others suffer fully-fledged panic attacks with all the associated disabling symptoms. Most individuals understand that they are suffering from an irrational fear, but are powerless to override their initial panic reaction.
A fear is a powerful, unpleasant feeling of risk or danger, either real or imagined.Psychologists such as John B. Watson and Paul Ekman have argued that fear, along with a few other basic emotions such as joy and anger, is innate in all human beings. Fear is a defensive, survival advantage, and may have evolved in a variety of organisms. It is usually a response to a particular stimulus. For example, a person may see a spider and experience fear. Fear serves as motivation to escape to safety.
An example of this may be something dangerous and spontaneous, during this situation the blood goes to big muscles (like legs) allowing the person to run faster. Also the body freezes up just an instant allowing the brain to decide if another reaction would be better (like hiding). In the brain, hormones are released centering the attention on the threat always looking for the most accurate reaction.
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