The Mystery Behind Debilitating Phobias
David Hoberman is obsessive-compulsive and has more phobias than you can count.
"I always go to the right of anything," he told Sunday Morning correspondent Martha Teichner. "I will not go under ladders. I don't like to fly."
From the very first episode, Monk, USA cable's star detective, was meant to be the walking definition of anxiety disorder — but funny. The back-story is that Monk and Hoberman, the show's creator, have a lot in common.
For the 40 million Americans who have an anxiety disorder, fears from ailuraphobia (a terror of cats) to aphenphosmphobia (dread of being touched) are not just funny-sounding crossword solutions, as actor Tony Shalhoub discovered.
"People's lives can be, you know, shattered," he said. "I realized we really have to tread lightly here, because it's a serious problem."
Jerilyn Ross, who runs the Anxiety Disorders Association of America, said that people who suffer from obsessive compulsive disorder are being sent the wrong signals about what they should fear.
"Something is telling your body that there's danger, but there isn't any danger, and so what happens is the person is totally aware that this is irrational," Ross said. "Even people with the same, exact anxiety disorder can have very different symptoms."
Jennifer Reines was 15 and at a party when her first panic attack came out of nowhere. Suddenly, her body felt very hot and the room began to spin.
"I felt like I was having a heart attack," she said. "It was probably the most terrifying experience in my life, and then after that I started to get them every single night before I went to bed."
Stephanie McKee has a fear of elevators and has been in therapy for years. She can remember walking up 19 flights of stairs rather than taking an elevator.
Emily Ford was afraid of talking in public. It got so bad that at one point she eight months living by herself in a cabin with no electricity in the Vermont woods.
"I'd sweat," she said. "I'd just be terrified that I was just gonna say something wrong or foolish and I couldn't talk, so I just wouldn't go out."
All three of these young women have been struggling to overcome what they consider the living hell of their anxiety disorders at the treatment center Ross runs outside Washington, D.C.
"A lot of people think that, 'Oh, you're not really sick,' or you know, 'It's just in your head and you can just get over it,'" Reines said. "But it is a disease."
Scientists have found that there is usually a genetic predisposition to anxiety disorders and they can be triggered by a physical or emotional trauma. Caffeine can even set off the accompanying panic attacks. Twice as many women have anxiety disorders as men, and sufferers can't turn their fears off because their brains function abnormally.
Dean of the Mount Sinai Medical School in New York City, Psychiatrist Dennis Charney studies anxiety disorders. He said the amygdala, the part of the brain that registers fear, seems to be overactive in the brain of a person who suffers from anxiety disorder. The cerebral cortex, the part of the brain that tells you to calm down, appears to be under-active.
"For the patient, many times it's gratifying to know that it's not a weakness, that this is a brain disorder that scientists are learning more about every day, so we can develop better treatment," Charney said.
Phobias, like the fear of heights James Stewart experiences in "Vertigo," are the most common of the many anxiety disorders. In "The Aviator," Leonardo DiCaprio plays reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, who had among other things a germ phobia. Hollywood seems to love fictional anxiety disorders — remember Jack Nicholson in "As Good as It Gets?"
But real performers get them as well. Donny Osmond and Barbra Streisand both have suffered from social anxiety disorder, which led to debilitating stage fright. Streisand didn't perform in public for years.
Because of 9/11 and the Iraq war it would be hard not to have heard of post traumatic stress disorder.
Composer Allen Shawn suffers from agoraphobia — a fear of being unable to escape, and a fear of being anywhere outside his personal safety zones, including Bennington College in Vermont, where he teaches. Cars, elevators, airplanes, open spaces and closed spaces can all frighten him.
"I have turned my car around many, many, many times," he said. "I'll literally have the feeling, you know, I don't deserve to live. It's a terrible, terrible feeling."
He called the memoir he's just written "Wish I Could Be There." His father, William Shawn, the longtime editor of "The New Yorker" magazine, had multiple phobias and the magazine was his safety zone.
"The New Yorker made it possible for him to engage with everything and with all kinds of people, without you know, going to Mt. Everest," Shawn said.
Shawn believes that his phobias were triggered by the institutionalization of his twin sister Mary who was autistic. He said he internalized the shock of what he saw as a banishment of his sister. His feelings were then compounded by the fact that his family never discussed what happened.
"We didn't process it as a catastrophe," he said.
Shawn believes years of treatment, medication and psychotherapy have helped him battle his fears and to accept that his achievements, even his music, may be a response to them.
"In music I can actually go down the lonely wooded road and not, you know, bolt from it and turn the car around," he said.
Monk, the TV detective, may also benefit from his phobias. Monk has become the stand-in for millions of Americans, who want people to realize that for them, just getting through a day can be an act of courage.
"The crime solving is related to his obsession with orderliness," Shalhoub said. "I just focus on what's off."
"The fact that Monk is so brilliant, and the fact that at the end of the episode he is able to overcome his issues, to solve the murder, is heroic," Hoberman said.