Collection · 12 entries
Phobias in the DSM-5
Phobia words run to several hundred and the number a diagnostic manual recognises is very much smaller, but the count is not the interesting part. The DSM sorts specific phobia into five types and this set walks them one at a time, one representative entry each, in the order the manual lists them: animal, natural environment, blood-injection-injury, situational, and then the residual heading for everything that does not fit. That last one is where the manual keeps its honesty. A type called other, holding fears that are real and common and belong to none of the four.
After the specific phobias come the conditions that are not specific phobias at all, and most of the reading is there. Agoraphobia was separated out and given its own criteria. Social anxiety disorder covers the fear whose object is other people. Several fears that look like phobias were filed with the obsessive-compulsive disorders instead, because the mechanism is intrusive thought and checking rather than avoidance of a thing. One diagnosis was deleted outright in 2013 and its population divided between two replacements. What the walk shows is that the manual is not a list of frightening things. It is a set of arguments about mechanism, and an object can move from one heading to another without anybody's fear changing at all.
Hand-set, never alphabetical
The set, in order
12 entries
- Fear of Mice and RatsAnimal type, and named as one of the commonest of them alongside snakes and spiders
- Fear of Thunder and LightningNatural environment type, where the feared thing is a condition rather than an object
- Fear of Blood, Injections and InjuryIts own type, and the only one defined by a physiological response rather than by a class of object
- Fear of FlyingSituational type, and the one where avoidance is easiest to arrange and most expensive to keep
- Fear of VomitingThe residual other type, which is where the manual admits its four headings do not cover the ground
- AgoraphobiaSeparated from panic disorder and given its own criteria, which is the largest single reclassification here
- Social Anxiety DisorderWhere the object is other people, and where favourable evaluation counts as a trigger too
- Separation Anxiety DisorderMoved out of the childhood-onset section, because adults have it and the manual had said they could not
- Selective MutismFiled with the anxiety disorders after years of being read as defiance
- Fear of Body DeformityFiled with the obsessive-compulsive disorders, because the mechanism is checking rather than avoidance
- Fear of Offending OthersNamed in the manual by its Japanese name, under the obsessive-compulsive heading rather than the social one
- Health AnxietyThe diagnosis the DSM-5 deleted in 2013, splitting its population three to one between two replacements
Keep going
The other collections
- Words That Are Not PhobiasPhotophobia, homophobia, xenophobia, chromophobia. Where the suffix does scientific, political or sociological work instead of naming a fear.
- Medical and Dental FearsThe fears whose avoidance is itself the danger. Needles, dentists, doctors, hospitals and scans, and what avoiding each one costs the person avoiding it.
- Most Common PhobiasSpiders, heights, flying, the dentist, public speaking: the phobias most often called common, each with the prevalence figure the claim rests on.
- One Word, Two Different FearsAerophobia, phonophobia, basophobia: terms carrying two unrelated senses, with the collision traced and the usable meaning named.