Dromophobia: characteristics, symptoms, causes and treatment

This type of phobia appears in people who feel an intense fear when crossing the street.

There are a great number of situations, people, objects or animals that generate an irrational fear in part of the population. All these make up a long list of phobias that most people face to a greater or lesser extent.

One of these phobias is dromophobia.. This strange anxiety disorder prevents people who suffer from it from crossing any street or urban road, interfering very significantly in their daily routine.

• Article related: "Types of phobias: exploring the disorders of the fear".

What is dromophobia?

As the rest of phobias, the dromophobia is considered an anxiety disorder in which the person experiences an excessive and irrational terror to cross the street.In this case, the extremely high anxiety that he feels every time he has to cross a street inhibits him from doing so.

Although dromophobia is a little known type of phobia, it can become an extremely disabling disorder, in which people who suffer from it experience many difficulties when living in urban areas because of the fear they feel at the moment of crossing the street.

Fortunately, there are there are very effective treatments for dromophobia thanks to which the person is able to overcome the phobia and lead a normal life.

Clinical characteristics.

As mentioned above, dromophobia is considered an anxiety disorder. It is necessary to specify that the object of focus of the phobia is not the street or its intersections, but the action of crossing the street itself.

The main consequence of dromophobia is that the person shies away from all situations or actions in which he/she has to cross the street, to the point of secluding themselves at home, thus interfering with their dailythus interfering with his or her daily obligations and needs.

Like many other anxiety disorders, dromophobia is distinguished by being a phobic fear, which presents the following characteristics:

• Excessive and disproportionate fear considering the actual dangerousness of the situation.
• It is an irrational fear
• The person is unable to control this fear.
• It generates avoidance behaviors of the situation
• It is a constant and permanent fear and permanent

Symptomatology

The main symptom of dromophobia is the experience of great anxiety, with all its associated symptoms. This symptomatology does not appear continuously. in time, only when the person faces or knows that he/she is going to face the feared action, in this case crossing the street.

This symptomatology can be classified into three categories, depending on whether they correspond to physical, cognitive or behavioral symptoms.

1. Physical symptoms

In general, any phobia, as well as the experience of an exaggerated fear, produces a series of changes and alterations at the physical and organic level, due to the acceleration of the activity of the peripheral nervous system. These physical symptoms include:

• Acceleration of the Heart rate
• Increased respiratory rate
• Palpitations
• Shortness of breath sensation
• Muscle stiffness
• Excessive sweating
• Headaches
• Gastric pain
• Nausea, dizziness and faintness
• Vomiting

Cognitive symptoms

These physical symptoms are accompanied by a series of distorted and irrational thoughts about the situation or situations in which the person must cross the street.

These thoughts are distinguished by a high negative charge, in which the person may perceive that some kind of accident or catastrophe may happen to him or her. that some kind of accident or catastrophe may happen to him/her at the moment or while crossing the street.or while crossing the street.

3. Behavioral symptoms

As it is habitual in the specific phobias, the phobia itself ends up interfering in the behavioral patterns. interfering in the behavioral patterns of the person.. Altering their way of proceeding in daily life and generating two types of response: avoidant behavior and escape from the situation.

Avoidant behaviors are those behaviors that the person with dromophobia performs in order to avoid having to perform the behavior, such as not leaving the house. While escape behaviors originate when you are about to face the feared situation, an example would be crossing all the streets running.

Causes of dromophobia

Although it is not always possible to detect at first sight, or to know the causes of a phobia, there are a number of possible causes common to all phobias which foster and drive them.

These mechanisms or associated risk factors are:

• Genetic elements
• Personality
• Cognitive styles
• Direct conditioning
• Vicarious learning

Diagnosis

There are a series of established diagnostic criteria that must be fulfilled when evaluating and diagnosing a person with dromophobia.

• Excessive, perseverant and irrational fear that originates from the anticipation of the action or from the coping with it, in this case, the action of crossing a street or urban road.
• The patient admits that The fear felt is exaggerated and illogical..
• Exposure to the feared action immediately triggers an anxiety or crisis response.
• The person shies away or avoids the situation.
• The feeling of anxiety or fearand the associated avoidant actions interfere markedly with the person's daily life, or cause clinically relevant distress.
• The duration of symptoms must be at least 6 months.
• The above symptoms cannot be explained by another type of disorder or mental illness..

Treatment

As it was commented at the beginning of the article, in spite of how disabling this specific phobia can be, effective treatments exist for that the person can end up taking a normal rhythm and style of life..

In the case of phobias, the type of intervention with the highest success rate is cognitive-behavioral therapy, where systematic desensitization (SD) has proven to be highly effective.

In this systematic desensitization, the patient is exposed in an imaginary way to a series of situations related to the phobia, which are ordered in a gradual way, from lower to higher degree of fear. In addition, relaxation techniques are applied, relaxation techniques are applied to reduce the level of anxiety. to reduce the level of anxiety.