When I was a kid, we got a new twisty tube-slide at the elementary school.
Kids liked to clog it up on purpose, with the kid at the bottom stopping and holding
everyone else in the pipe.
Some kids thought it was a riot, but I felt trapped and immediately had a sense of dread.
I screamed, the kids unclogged, and I was instantly uncool.
Was that claustrophobia?
Or something else?
In 1879, physician Dr. Benjamin Ball observed two patients in Paris who, curiously, couldn't
stay in their apartment with the doors closed without anxiety, and a third who was climbing
Saint-Jacques Tower, and felt an overwhelming urge to flee.
She ran to the exit, "dashing her head" in the process.
Apparently, the urge immediately vanished upon reaching the open air.
Ball dubbed this bizarre feeling "claustrophobia," and the 1881 American Journal of Insanity
called it "a special form of delirium, characterized by a 'fear of closed spaces;'" today they
include narrow spaces with enclosed ones.
The list of spaces is long, including subways, elevators, rooms without windows, public bathrooms,
tunnels, cars, hotel rooms, planes and so on.
And even THINKING about it can trigger an attack… sorry.
Most people who live with it don't get it formally diagnosed, because there's no need
to do so, their own fear causes those affected to spend much of their lives avoiding trigger
spaces.
The National Health Service in the UK says 10-percent of the population is affected by
claustrophobia, though studies find only about four percent will suffer from full-blown attacks.
I call it an attack, because psychologists and psychiatrists connect it to anxiety disorders,
believing it's essentially a short-lived panic attack.
It might be caused by some kind of childhood trauma.
For example, losing one's parents in a crowded place, getting stuck in a hole (or a slide?)...
it's really hard to say.
Since the late 19th century, researchers have been digging into this crazy fear, and found
very little solid ground.
A 2007 study in the Journal of Magnetic Resonance Imaging found women were far more likely than
men to experience claustrophobia, and a study in the journal Cognition in 2011, found it
may have to do with the invisible bubble of "personal space" we all project around us.
Most people's personal space extends only as far as we can reach, but people with claustrophobia
may be projecting their personal space beyond their reach!
Thus, when someone violates that territorial bubble, the person experiences a panic attack!
Researchers think this disorder may have a connection to acrophobia, or a fear of heights;
as people with claustrophobia seem to underestimate horizontal distances the way acrophobics do
with vertical ones.
Essentially, they believe the room is smaller than it really is.
This study is about as far as we've come to understanding the disorder.
Perhaps it's a defense mechanism, and some are simply more sensitive to it…
There does seem to be a genetic component as well.
A 2013 study in Translational Psychiatry found a single mutation on gene Gpm6a causes "claustrophobia-like"
behavior in mice.
Plus, a study in Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences found people with panic disorders had significantly
smaller amygdalae: the section of the brain that processes fear!
In the end, they're still trying to figure out WHY some people experience claustrophobia.
As with most anxiety disorders, there's no true "cure."
Symptoms can be managed, but if the phobia is severe, specialists will recommend exposure
therapy -- where the claustrophobic person would be walked through imagining, and then
experiencing the things that cause the fear until they, essentially, get over it.
It's rough, but so far, is the best we have.
More research is, for sure, needed.
What do you think?
Have you experienced claustrophobia?