Phobia is unlike common cold

By Park Jin-hai, Kwon Ji-youn, Yoon Sung-won

"It's circles," Hwang Soo-kyung said in a trembling voice, when asked what scares her the most. Then she closed her eyes as if she could see them here and now. Even the very thought of circles was enough to make her shudder.

The medical term for her condition is "trypophobia," or repetitive pattern phobia. "At the sight of small circular figures of clams clustered on rocks or strawberry seeds, instant fear runs down my spine. I feel like something might creep out of those circles."

Circles are everywhere, so are trypophobes. On websites or blogs, self-diagnosed trypophobes share tales of vomiting, sleep loss and anxiety attacks at the sight of honeycombs and rotting wood punched with holes.

However alien her diagnostic name is, celebrity figures daily own up about their phobias on television reality shows; actor Ricky Kim fears sharp objects; rapper Bbaek ga, cats; emcee Yoo Jae-suk, heights; actors Cha Seung-won and Ha Ji-won, birds; and the list runs endless.

Experts said that phobias are rather common in modern society. In fact, no one is completely free from phobias although the degree of them varies from mild to severe cases.

According to a paper published by Dr. Yoo Eun-jung in 2012, the number of known phobias is over 500 and nearly 11 percent of the global population suffers from the condition. That means the odds are tall that you may be with one or two people suffering from any type of phobia at any given time. Even though they don't openly talk about it.

Kim Min-jun, 31, confessed ordinary things can be extraordinary for him, for instance, driving in the rain.

"I recently had a near miss, when I suddenly realized raindrops were falling on the windshield. They felt like acupuncturists' needles," said the former magazine reporter.

A pen's tip heading toward him or the corner of a table can make him feel threatened. He feels as if his vision is locked onto the sharpness of the object and his brainwaves gallop uncontrollably. He has trypanophobia, or needle phobia, and wishes to end his ordeal and live a normal life.

Take Song's case. The 21-year-old remembers how much she hated going to the mall since she was a child. Her mother would hold her by hand and squeeze it in an assuring gesture, but Song would still shake as she roamed the shopping center.

A speck of yellow appeared in her peripheral vision, and she let out a small scream. It was the M for McDonalds. She fears McDonalds because of a seemingly harmless smiley figure the franchises put out front ― the clown.

"Clowns are people cursed to smile for the entirety of their life. They're hiding something big behind that huge smile," said Song.

Although she thought it would get better with age, at her 17th birthday party when a clown entered the room, panic-bound Song shrieked. Her condition is called "coulrophobia."

Whatever the difference, all types of phobia share two things: first, they know that their fear is irrational and second, they have "triggers" that surface after unfortunate events of one's life and turn them into illness.

Unlike people with other psychological disorders who cannot recognize their abnormalities, those with phobias know too well of their conditions.

"People with a phobia of black clothes, for instance, know their fear is groundless but cannot help it. Patients with a paranoiac fear about the same object but it could stem from a delusion, say, a man in black clothes, following to kill them," said Kim Dae-ho, a psychiatry professor at Hanyang University.

Prof. Kim pointed out nearly two thirds of patients have experienced traumatic events. In Kim's case, with needle phobia, it was a childhood incident in which a neighborhood boy sank, with all his body weight, a shovel into Kim's hand instead of into the sand, leaving a wide open cut on his hand. .

Hwang and Song said in the interview they cannot understand why they came to develop the symptoms. They couldn't pinpoint any peculiar memory. However, Prof. Kim said according to the behavioral theory, there should be a trigger whether they recognize it or not.

Sometimes memories are suppressed. Simply put, people are too afraid to even be reminded of the incidents and have erased them all from their memory. Or phobias could be "displacement" of unhappy memories.

"Clowns could be a reminder of your fear-evoking father and bandages wrapped around your mother's injured hand and the shock you felt could be projected onto the circles," he said.

Phobias may be as common as a cold. However, patients are unaware that their condition is treatable as easily as the common cold. Doctors say that if they receive treatment, the recovery rate can be as high as 90 percent.

In reality, only a few seek treatment. They fear that despite treatment their state could persist and most don't even know where to begin.

Kim also has turned a blind eye to his symptoms for nearly 20 years, hoping they would disappear with time. For him the footage of actor Ricky Kim panicking and shedding tears out of fear of needles was rather a relief. Because, now he knows what he has been facing and how to explain it to people around him.

Whatever comfort he feels, there is one thing he is missing. That is unlike the common cold, we don't have an immune system to recover our mental health. If left untreated, a cold will get better, but your phobia will not.