Fear of Crowds

Which names the crowd fear carries

Three names are in circulation:

• enochlophobia, from the Greek for a throng
• ochlophobia, from ochlos, a crowd or a mob
• demophobia, from demos, the people

Each has the shape of a term and none has anything behind it.

The 2008 printed encyclopedia of phobias reaches the same place: its material on crowds sits under its own agoraphobia heading, and claustrophobia's definition there includes crowds among the enclosed spaces it covers. Two of the largest terms in the subject both claim the crowd, which is a reasonable indication that neither owns it.

Why the larger fears claim it

A crowd is two things at once, and that is what makes the small term unstable.

For Claustrophobia, a crowd is an enclosure made of people. The 2015 reference lists crowds directly among the situations, and the beliefs it identifies apply without modification: a person in a dense crowd is restricted from leaving and can reasonably wonder about air. A crowded lift is the canonical trigger, and the crowd is doing half the work.

For agoraphobia, a crowd is a place where escape would be difficult and help unavailable if panic began. That is the defining judgement of the diagnosis, and it applies to a crowd more cleanly than to almost any other situation on its list.

Both readings are correct and they describe different fears. A person who avoids a packed train because the air feels thin is not having the same experience as a person who avoids it because leaving would mean pushing past forty strangers, and no vocabulary in current use distinguishes them.

What a crowd fear would need to be

For enochlophobia to be a term rather than a synonym, it would have to name something the two larger diagnoses miss: a fear of the crowd as an agent rather than as a container. Crowds do behave as agents, and the fear of being caught in one that turns is a rational fear with a documented history of crushes and stampedes behind it.

Nothing in the material develops that. The word has never been attached to the thing that would justify it, and the fear that would justify it is not clearly a phobia at all.

What this entry can honestly say

That a fear of crowds is real and commonly reported. That it is documented only inside agoraphobia and claustrophobia, which measure it as part of themselves and never separately. That any percentage found attached to enochlophobia was measured on one of those two diagnoses, since nothing else has ever been measured.

And that the three Greek names are a good example of how this vocabulary grows. A recognisable experience acquires a word, the word acquires two variants, the variants acquire dictionary entries, and at no point does anybody study the thing. The catalogue records the term because people search for it, and records that the record is empty because that is the useful part.