Coprophobia (fear of feces): causes, symptoms and treatment

Stool phobia can have certain disturbing symptoms.

Coprophobia, also known as scatophobia, is a specific phobia whose sufferers manifest an irrational and unjustified fear of excrement. Patients with this rare disorder suffer high levels of anxiety when they are confronted with feces. Thus, they try to avoid seeing or perceiving excrement whenever they can.

Although this is an uncommon discomfort, those affected by coprophobia may find their daily life disrupted and suffer from a discomfort that requires psychological treatment. In this summary we will review what coprophobia consists of, its most frequent causes, its symptoms and signs and different types of intervention that can help to manage it.

What is coprophobia?

Coprophobia is an anxiety disorder.. It is a rare specific phobia that requires health and/or psychological intervention in most cases.

These subjects feel an extreme aversion towards feces, appearing an unusual and exaggerated fear towards excrement. This fear may be based on certain irrational beliefs or thoughts and generates great anxiety.

Characteristics and diagnosis

Not all fears or rejection of feces can be labeled with the diagnosis of coprophobia. In fact, for the diagnosis to be reliable, it will be essential that certain specific symptoms and characteristics are present. These are as follows.

1. Exaggerated fear

The fear of stool experienced by those affected by coprophobia is clearly excessive in its intensity and in terms of the discomfort it generates.. This causes their mind to react with acute symptoms of anxiety and nervousness when exposed to excrement.

Excrement poses no real threat to humans, but individuals affected by coprophobia have distorted cognitions and perceive it as highly threatening or dangerous.

2. Irrational thoughts

The fear generated by coprophobia is of high intensity and exaggerated because it is not based on rational thoughts. These distorted cognitions generate anxiety in the face of a false threat..

Distorted and unrealistic ideas about the potential danger of feces are the cause of the discomfort manifested by the affected subject.

3. Uncontrollable fear

Another characteristic symptom of coprophobia is that the fear is uncontrollable.. That is, the affected individual does not have any resources to manage the emergence of negative feelings, as well as unwanted anxiety responses.

4. Persistent fear

The fear is also characterized by being prolonged in time, i.e. persistent.. It is not a fear that arises in an isolated or punctual way, in some concrete stage or after a determined experience.

Thus, the phobic fear of feces may not be solved if psychological measures are not taken and a clinical intervention is not carried out on the patient.

5. Avoidance

Finally, the phobic fear of excrement generates the main behavior of this phobia: avoidance. Subjects with this phobia try to avoid exposure to feces as much as possible, even escaping suddenly to avoid such contact.

Symptoms Coprophobia is an anxiety disorder, since its symptoms are mainly those of an anxious patient.

The expressions of coprophobia in the behavior and mind of the affected person can be of three types: cognitive symptoms, physical symptoms and behavioral symptoms.

Physical symptoms

The fear suffered by people with coprophobia generates the appearance of a long list of alterations in the correct functioning of their organism when the affected person is exposed to excrement.

This alteration is caused by an imbalance in the normal activity of the autonomic nervous system. This increase can lead to a series of signs typical of anxietysuch as the following:

• Increased Heart rate
• Increased breathing rate
• Palpitations
• Tachycardia
• Muscle tension
• Sweating
• Feeling of unreality
• Dizziness, nausea and vomiting

2. Cognitive symptoms

In addition to the physical signs coprophobia also produces a number of cognitive alterations. These are based on irrational ideas and thoughts about the discomfort and threat posed by excrement.

These thoughts arise with greater force and intensity when the affected person is exposed to the phobic element. In addition, the physical symptoms feed back and encourage the anxiety produced by the phobic stimulus.

3. Behavioral symptoms

Finally, coprophobia also presents several behavioral symptoms, coprophobia also presents several behavioral symptoms.. These manifestations arise in response to the physical and cognitive symptoms, due to the increased anxiety and general discomfort suffered by the affected person.

The most common behaviors in this disorder are avoidance and flight. Avoidance is defined as the series of behaviors that the patient engages in in order to avoid contact with the excreta. On the other hand, flight is the behavior that occurs when the individual cannot avoid contact with the feces and instinctively moves away from the phobic stimulus.

Causes

Coprophobia is a phobia that may be due to different causes and factors that can be considered risk factors.

The propensity to suffer anxiety, vicarious conditioning, verbal conditioning, certain personality traits or genetic risk factors make a person more at risk of developing this phobic disorder.

Treatment

The best treatment for this type of phobias is psychological therapy.. Specifically, cognitive-behavioral therapy has proven to be highly effective in controlling symptoms and returning the subject to normality.

This therapy is based on progressive exposure to the phobic stimulus. Slowly, the patient approaches (throughout the therapy sessions) and habituates to the stool and learns to manage his anxiety and the discomfort he feels.

Bibliographical references:

• American Psychiatric Association. DSM-IV-TR Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (2002). Barcelona: Masson.
• Braunstein, N. A. (2015). Classifying in psychiatry. 2nd. reprint. Mexico: Siglo XXI.