Abdulaziz Alhajeri Ch s 151 Tu-Th 9.30 Informative Speech June 17, 2014 Phobias Can you imagine being so afraid of something that it becomes hard to breathe? That your anxiety is so high that you are completely frozen? What if you did not know when you would experience this level of fear which could happen at any time and you live your life trying to avoid it? This is what having a phobia can feel like. According to the National Institute of Health, more than 3.6 million Americans have a phobia of some sort and can live with fear like this every day. Upon learning about other people's phobias, some people can say that they sound irrational and don't make sense, but this is how a phobia can be characterized. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition there are different types of phobias: social phobias, specific phobias and agoraphobia. Social phobias can be divided into two categories: generalized social phobia and specific social phobia. Generalized social phobia is better known as social anxiety disorder. According to Franklin Schneider 2006, approximately 12% of Americans have social anxiety disorder at some time in their life. This disorder can be explained as the fear of being judged or by doing something embarrassing in public. This disorder may cause sufferers to avoid social situations as much as possible. Specific social phobia is more targeted and can be experienced in social situations with specific triggers such as someone with glossophobia who fears public speaking. Glossophobia is thought to be the most common phobia in America. The most well known types of phobias are those which fall under the category of specific phobias. These are phobias which cause the sufferer to go out of his or her way to avoid the thing that cause this fear altogether. Specific phobias themselves can be divided into 5 different types: Animal type (such as arachnophobia, a fear of spiders), natural environment type (such as claustrophobia, a fear of confined spaces), situational type (such as acrophobia, a fear of heights), blood/injection/injury type (such as necrophobia, a fear of death) and other. Specific phobias are very common among children between the ages of 7 and 13 and can often been seen as a normal part of the developmental process. Agoraphpobia is the final kind of phobia noted by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition. Agoraphobia is the fear of open spaces which often leaves the sufferer house-bound for many years, unable to leave the walls of their home for fear of what lies outside of these walls. I have an aunt who suffers from this kind of phobia and rarely leaves her house even though she has nothing to do there and it makes her life very difficult. As we said before, these fears can be completely irrational to those who do not suffer from them. But how can we diagnose a phobia? One fact is that we cannot diagnose a .