3. Phobias

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this lecture, we think about phobia as an anxiety-related condition in which sufferers are generally able to lead a normal life, however, they experience intense feelings of anxiety in certain contexts, focusing in particular on: (i) specific phobia where anxiety is caused by specific situations or triggers (e.g. fear of flying, fear of spiders); (ii) social phobia where anxiety arises from the feeling of being under intense social scrutiny; (iii) agoraphobia as a fear of finding oneself in a situation from which escape would be difficult or in which one feels unsafe (e.g. fear of feeling trapped on public transport, fear of leaving the house).

Course

In this course, Professor Femi Oyebode (University of Birmingham) explores anxiety and anxiety-related disorders. In the first lecture, we think about the general nature of emotions and how we experience them. In the second lecture, we think about anxiety and anxiety disorders more specifically. In the third lecture, we think about phobias, including specific phobia, social phobia and agoraphobia. Next, we think about obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and its relation to anxiety. In the fifth and final lecture, we think about stress-related conditions such as acute stress disorder (ASD), adjustment disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Lecturer

Professor Oyebode is an expert in descriptive and clinical psychopathology. He is an authority on the cognitive neuropsychiatry of delusional misidentification syndromes and on other rare and unusual psychiatric syndromes. He is the author of Sims’ Symptoms in the Mind: textbook of descriptive psychopathology. This is the leading English language text on psychopathology and has been translated into Estonian, Italian, Korean and Portuguese He is also a recognised expert in medical humanities writing about the value of literature to medicine.