Claustrophobia Symptoms

What are fears but voices airy?
Whispering harm where harm is not.
And deluding the unwary
Till the fatal bolt is shot!
~ William Wordsworth

Does the thought of entering a packed storage bother you? Would you rather take the stairs to reach the eighth floor than enter the elevator? If you have answered any of these questions in the affirmative, chances are that you have some amount of claustrophobia programmed in your psyche! Before getting down to the specifics of this particular fear of confined places, let's first understand what the term Phobia implies. Not all fears qualify as phobias. You see, the fact that you're freaked out by insects and bugs doesn't necessarily mean that you suffer from entomophobia! You see, most people get jittery by insects and bugs - the creepy, crawly, lesser creatures of Nature - unless you throw up a racket (I mean a serious one, which may include claustrophobia symptoms like blanking out or getting into fits of paranoia or taking extreme steps to fortify your abode against even the slightest invasion or infestation by insects) serious enough for the entire neighborhood to get into a RED ALERT mode! To quote Wikipedia, a Phobia is "an irrational, intense and persistent fear of certain situations, activities, things, animals, or people. The main symptom of this disorder is the excessive and unreasonable desire to avoid the feared stimulus." Before getting to the details of claustrophobia symptoms, let's first understand what claustrophobia is all about.

What is Claustrophobia?

Claustrophobia is the excessive, irrational fear of closed and confined places. A person suffering from this fear disorder is acutely averse to the idea of finding himself/herself at a place where he finds himself "shut in" or confined and from where "breaking out" or escaping seems difficult to say the least, if not impossible. The fear of not being able to break out or escape may take such great magnitudes that the person experiencing such fear may display physical as well as emotional signs of fear of mortal danger such as sweating, shivering, fainting (from prolonged confinement) and temporary inability to move. Claustrophobia is prominently characterized by the victim's morbid fear of restriction and suffocation - he/she feels that a confined space would eventually suffocate him/her unless he/she is able to escape to an open space.

The common causes behind the onset of claustrophobia may be neutral, conditioned, as well as unconditioned stimuli. An unconditioned stimulus that may have occurred in the past, which had a very strong impact upon the individual's psyche, may be express itself as a conditioned response on encountering a similar stimulus in the future. In case of claustrophobia, the fear of confined places may have taken root in a person who may have once been accidentally locked up in a small, suffocating room and was unable to get out for a long time. This incident got etched in that person's subconscious mind so strongly that every time he encounters a closed-space situation, the only response he, conditioned by his unpleasant, subconscious memories, is able to elicit is fear and aversion to confinements.

Symptoms of Claustrophobia

Most common claustrophobia symptoms in children and adults include fear and avoidance of small rooms, locked places, cellars, tunnels, elevators, caves, airplanes, crowded places and places without ventilation. The fear of these places and situations do not arise out of the subjects of fear themselves - rather, the fear is rooted within the concern of what might happen if the victim gets confined to such a place and is unable to get out. That way, the fears of a claustrophobic are not primary, but secondary or derived in nature.

Treatment of Claustrophobia

Mild to moderate cases of claustrophobia can be cured while severe cases may be treated considerably to keep the anxiety attacks under control. Common methods of treating claustrophobia include Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), In Vivo Exposure and Interoceptive Exposure. Under CBT, the distorted perceptions regarding what might happen if the patient gets into a confined place are modified to rid him/her of suffering from such anxiety disorder. In Vivo Exposure is a method of treatment by which the subject is forced to face his/ her fears by deliberately exposing him/her to the objects of his/ her fears - confinements. The treatment is conducted progressively by initially exposing the subject to lesser magnitudes of confinement and then gradually increasing the degree. Interoceptive Exposure method is a toned down version of In Vivo Exposure and the subject is made to face his fears in a controlled environment.

The above pointers on indications and treatment of claustrophobia provide a generalized picture of how this anxiety disorder can be identified and what are the therapeutic methods that can be used to bring one's irrational fears under control. Ultimately, it is up to you to decide whether you want to live with these fears for the rest of your life or whether you're gonna make the effort to fight them off! I know it's easier said than done - I am a claustrophobic myself. However, I have been constantly making efforts to fight my fears of closed places and now, I am able to enter an elevator without bothering about getting stuck in it, even as it gets packed with people and the door closes! I just decided that the elevator ain't no bully and the next thing I knew was that I wasn't scared out of my wits on entering one any longer. I'm still scared of entering cellars and packed storage spaces but I'm working on them too. Hey, if I can do it, so can you! I'll conclude with an extremely inspiring German proverb that I came across on the Internet once (don't remember the site!!) which beautifully, yet simply, captures the essence of fear:
'Fear makes the wolf bigger than he is.'