Fear of Flashes of Light

What the verification discussion revealed

Wiktionary ran a request for verification on selaphobia between January and August 2015 and the entry survived it. In the course of that discussion an editor set out a distinction that applies well beyond this word: there are two meanings for many of these terms, the fear of something, which is what the word lists carry, and a biological or clinical intolerance of it. Selaphobia, on that reading, is either a fear of flashes or, in ophthalmology, an intolerance of them. Chlorophobia was the example offered alongside, which might be a fear of chlorine, of chloroform or of the colour green, or a plant's intolerance of chlorine compounds.

The same editor raised a practical problem that explains why so many of these words fail verification. The terms arrive as a package, the condition, the adjective and the person, and each form is rare enough on its own that a word can be well understood and still have too few citations of any single form to survive. Their proposal was that the forms be allowed to attest each other.

That is a lexicographer describing, from the inside, why the phobia vocabulary is so hard to pin down.

How ophthalmology uses the word

The intolerance sense is not hypothetical. A paper by Yun Feng, Yang Li and Wei Wang on visual function after cataract surgery with an aspherical intraocular lens lists selaphobia among the complaints patients make afterwards, alongside dizziness, reduced contrast sensitivity and blurred vision in the dark.

Nobody in that sentence is frightened of anything. The word is being used for a physical intolerance of flashes in an eye that has had its lens replaced, in exactly the way photophobia is used, and the phobia lists that carry selaphobia as a fear are describing something else under the same spelling.

What the fear sense covers

The 2008 encyclopedia of phobias defines selaphobia as fear of flashing lights and then does something unusual: it declines to treat the light as the object. The fear, it says, is often related to anxiety produced by excessive stimulation, and it gives three examples of situations that involve stimulation and may provoke anxiety in a person prone to it:

• car headlights at night
• crowds of people
• confusing buildings

Two of those three have no lights in them. What the entry is describing is a threshold for input rather than a fear of a stimulus, which puts selaphobia closer to the sensory overload Misophonia describes for sound than to a specific phobia, and it is filed here with a crowd and a badly signposted building rather than with a strobe.

Where selaphobia turns up

Rarely, and in odd company. Wiktionary's citations are a 1985 guide to literary journals, which quotes a poet writing about selaphobia, a magazine piece from 2013 that offers a disco ball as the trigger, and the cataract surgery paper. The list sites carry it as a branch of photophobia and connect it to epilepsy and migraine, and the wiki that does so warns on every page that some of the phobias it presents are fictional.