Fear of Crossing Bridges

How the bridge authorities responded

The New York State Thruway Authority ran the same service on the Tappan Zee Bridge, and as of 2008 was performing it about six times a year. The Maryland Transportation Authority offered one for the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and has since handed the role to private companies.

Set the Mackinac figure against the Tappan Zee figure and something becomes visible that no article states. A thousand a year against six a year is not a difference in how many frightened drivers exist in Michigan and New York. It is a difference in what each bridge is like to cross, and the Mackinac has open steel grating in its span.

Why the word covers tunnels as well

The term covers bridges and tunnels alike, and older structures more than new ones, which is a specific claim about what is being read. Somebody frightened of a bridge is reading it for signs of failure.

The three fears the material names are separable:

• driving off the bridge, which is about control
• a gust blowing the vehicle off, which is about force from outside
• the bridge collapsing, which is about structural integrity

Only the third is a fear of the bridge itself. The fear is stronger on taller bridges, which is where it overlaps with acrophobia.

What a clinician says it actually is

Michael Liebowitz, who founded the Anxiety Disorders Clinic at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, is quoted directly and is worth quoting in full, because he declines to treat this as a phobia of bridges:

It's not an isolated phobia, but usually part of a larger constellation ... It's people who get panic attacks. You get light-headed, dizzy; your heart races. You become afraid that you'll feel trapped.

That reading puts gephyrophobia inside panic disorder and makes the bridge a setting rather than an object. A bridge is a stretch of road with no exits and no way to stop, which is a description of a place where a panic attack cannot be escaped rather than a description of a hazard.

What the Mackinac death actually shows

One death is attached to this fear in the record and the attachment is doubtful. Leslie Ann Pluhar's Yugo went off the Mackinac Bridge in 1989. The subsequent investigation concluded that she had stopped over the open steel grating of the span and that a gust blowing up through the grating pushed the car off.

The material notes, flatly, that the recorded wind speeds on and around the bridge at the time do not support that conclusion. The story is nevertheless the one that circulates, and it is the concrete image behind one of the three fears named above. A fear that a gust will blow a car off a bridge has one famous case, and the case does not carry the explanation attached to it.

Where gephyrophobia turns up

The cultural record is unusually dense for a term with no literature. Lucy invokes it, with a slight mispronunciation, at her psychiatric help stand in A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965. Michael Palin's character Jim Nelson has it in the 1991 Channel 4 drama G.B.H. Brick has it in the episode of The Middle titled The Bridge. Frank Heffley has it in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid book The Long Haul, becoming dizzy in stopped traffic on a bridge.

Four appearances across sixty years, and the fear has been treated as comic in most of them.

Why the evidence is operational rather than clinical

No prevalence figure exists. The 2008 printed encyclopedia of phobias defines the word in three words and cross-references itself. The evidence that this fear is real and reasonably common is entirely operational: bridge authorities in three states found it worth staffing a service for, and one of them is still running it a thousand times a year.