INTHEMASSES

Kiana Hinkson

Arachnophobia

An extreme or irrational fear of arachnids—spiders, ticks, scorpions, etc.

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Hemophobia

An extreme or irrational fear of blood.

Fear is the universal condition in which Jordan Hall*'s agoraphobia is rooted in. Unaddressed, fear creates a gravitation to false perceptions of the world that are both consistent with the fear and with irrational ideas.

“I know that my agoraphobia is an irrational fear. It doesn't change the fact that there is this chemical panic response that goes on in my brain,” Hall said. Their irrational fear—not having control over their environment—is the root to agoraphobia, and why Hall now uses certain methods to be less susceptible to destructive spiraling from not knowing.

“I still very much have to be in control in my mind of what's going to happen. But I've kind of trained myself to let it go a bit and be like, 'I don't know how things are gonna go. And that that's okay,'” Hall said.

It took Hall an array of therapeutic services to reach their current state of acceptance with not having control. However, when a phobia goes untreated, it can disrupt in one's ability to rationally perceive the world around them.

19.3% of American adolescents aged 13-18 have a specific phobia.

(National Institute of Mental Health)

“Irrational fear of others actually spreads like wildfire among both closed populations, like a high school student body, and in the public in general. False information can very quickly get us into a situation where everybody is afraid of a group because fear of others is the kind of irrational fear that spreads readily in populations,” said Stanford sociology professor Micheal Rosenfeld.

In 1692, this phenomenon manifested in a community’s fear of demonic possession in women and subsequent grave consequences.

According to a History article, a group of young girls in the village of Salem, Massachusetts claimed that the devil possessed them supernaturally and that other women of the settlement were witches.

Over the next few months, this incident incited over a hundred witch accusations in the village and eventually escalated into more widespread accusations, trials, and 25 additional deaths.

A journal entry about the environment of the witch trials published by the American Economic Association, introduces the contributing factors to a culture conducive to that mass hysteria. It found that falling temperatures overlapped with spikes in the frequency of witchcraft trials, while rising temperatures paralleled plateaus.

The article attributes the lack of trust which induced the witch hunt to food and supply shortages from the cold weather and the uncertainty brought to the Bostonian Puritan community during the “little ice age.”

Although these environmental fears created genuine insecurity, the feeling of environmental threat can be just as powerful in inciting communal fear.

“That's probably true that when there's a sort of stress or crisis that people turn more readily to who they can blame for things. Although, you can almost always convince yourself that there's a crisis,” Rosenfeld said.

This phenomenon proved to be true, as some 300 years after the first American witch trials, a similar story spread throughout the U.S. in fear of demonic interaction from cultural changes: the Satanic Panic.

The 1980s saw extensive media coverage of people who believed that Satanists were murdering, assaulting, and brainwashing children.

This movement arose out a conservative take on the demand for daycare from more working women and the fear many parents had of their child being sexually assaulted.

In 1984, media coverage of a Michigan university sophomore by the Washington Post linked his suicide to his playing of Dungeons & Dragons (DnD), both of which were attributed to satanism

According to music history expert John Brackett in his University of Illinois Press journal, the panic grew into societal fear of DnD, certain demonic shapes, daycare, and rock-and-roll music with subliminal messages because of the way a word sounded backwards in the Led Zeppelin song Stairway to Heaven.

This bout of hysteria resulted in three teenagers being wrongly convicted of homicide in 1994, as covered by a New York Times article that associated the teenagers’ “gothic” appearance with satanism and ritualized murder of children.

In the same way that witch hunters had consumed news of girls admitting to demonic possession, overly-concerned suburban parents had seen vast television coverage of satanism as a potential threat to their child’s safety.

“Social change, or the perception of social change definitely can lead to fear. For instance, increasing roles for women or the LGBTQ+ community in society, that's a social change. So there's a tendency for people who see the society changing around them to be afraid and angry about their discomfort with the change which manifests blaming someone,” Rosenfeld said.

In current times, social media often accelerates stories that conveniently place blame on others as found in a statistical analysis of tweets on Jstor: “The spread of true and false news online.” The study found that retweeting, social interaction, and other human behaviors make “the truth take about six times as long as falsehood to reach 1500 people and 20 times as long as falsehood to reach 10 Twitter interactions.”

Historically, times of environmental uncertainty have promoted prime conditions for mass irrational fear. Social media did the same in the thick of the global COVID-19 pandemic that contributed to the irrational foundations to Hall’s agoraphobia.

Although media acceleration of statements benefits falsehoods more than truths, it still has benefits for personal action as when true stories spread it can inform positive change as represented by rational fear of COVID-19 that kept people inside.

“Fear of going out kept people inside. It was not unreasonable to have a fear of going out during the pandemic because going out was more dangerous than being with your immediate household,” Rosenfeld said.

Even though there are grave consequences to the phobias that come from misinformation, truthful information can also utilize common fears and the subsequent anxiety from them to spread safe personal behaviors.