Emetophobia

In Therapy

Discovery Health

AMONG my many obsessions is a mania for collecting absurd advice labels from packets of medicine.

I've got a bottle of Nytol sleeping tablets bearing the legend "may cause drowsiness", and a tiny tube of eye ointment with instructions in a font so microscopic that not even those with perfect sight could possibly read them.

But the jewel of my collection comes from a bottle of green fluid that I purchased in Mumbai, on a day when the world was falling out of my bottom.

"Possible side-effects," it begins, "include belching, abdominal cramps, ulcerative colitis, difficulty with sleeping, irritability, depression, tremor, indigestion, stomach ulcers, constipation, sore mouth and tongue, back pains, eye strain, inflammation of pancreas, liver difficulties, skin rashes, sensitivity to sunlight, tiredness, disorientation, ringing in ears, taste alteration, swelling due to water retention, tightness of the chest, diarrhoea, loss of appetite, vertigo, dizziness, bleeding from intestine, drowsiness, back pains, mouth ulcers, hair loss, drowsiness, impaired hearing, seizures, anxiety, mood changes, memory disturbances, changes in vision, bad dreams, allergic reactions, palpitations and impotence." Apart from that though, it appears to be perfectly safe.

Given the unfortunate consequences that swallowing pills and potions can lead to, it's not surprising that many people nowadays turn to counselling when they're feeling unwell.

It's a branch of medicine that's notoriously infested with psychobabbling charlatans (and I've been reluctant to try it ever since I saw a practitioner who had " PSYCHO THE RAPIST" erroneously written on his glass door), but there are areas where analysis can be beneficial, and Discovery Health's In Therapy series spent each day last week investigating them.

One of the patients seeking help was Lesley, a 30-year-old single mother whose life had been crippled by emetophobia ("I fear vomit and I fear being sick"), and who hadn't found much sympathy or understanding from her local GP.

So much so that when she'd sought treatment, he'd given her some tablets with a warning on the packet that they "can make you sick" (if only laughter really were the best medicine, Lesley would have been cured instantly).

I confess that my initial gut reaction (sic) was to mock, not least because the "controlled diet" she'd been existing on for years (mostly sweetcorn and beans) looked uncannily like spew, as she spooned it forlornly from her bowl.

But the problem was real, because over a decade her phobia had turned her from a lively and outgoing pub landlord into a virtual recluse, which was why the programme had arranged 10 sessions for her with David Bonner, a registered cognitive psychotherapist and hypnotherapist who wasn't afraid to make her regurgitate some long- repressed memories.

By the end of the first session, he'd diagnosed Lesley's real problem as chronically low self-esteem, and the tears that she shed after he'd uttered those words were not of pain, but of relief. Which was understandable, because I remember how relieved I felt when somebody diagnosed my own debilitating problem of aloogobiphobia (that's the fear of not knowing how to interpret the menu in a tandoori restaurant, and of accidentally blowing one's head off as a result).

Unfortunately, the programmemakers were clearly suffering from a secret dread of their own, namely Jicraphobia, the fear of low ratings due to short audience attention span.

Therefore, they kept condescendingly reminding us "ordinary people" that glamorous Hollywood celebrities can suffer from phobias, too ("Bond girl Denise Richard says she's terrified of being sick"), and adopted the patrician tone of a Seventies game show to tell us that "those stars can afford therapy... but we're giving Lesley the same benefit ... her very own therapist."

Consequently, the genuinely moving story of one woman's battle against her demons seemed trivialised when contrasted with such glib factoids as "there are lots of aviophobes, including Cher and Whoopee Goldberg. It's amazing how many celebrities fear flying."

What nonsense. Those people don't have a fear of flying. What they have (quite rightly) is a fear of crashing, of that awkward and decidedly unglamorous moment when your head ends up inside your chest cavity, "brace position" or not THIS was a stimulating and welli n t e n t i o n e d series, but how much better it would have been if the time wasted on celebrity trivia had instead been used to give viewers a deeper understanding of the various phobias.

Unlike the agony aunts and uncles beloved of daytime television, the likes of Bonner do seem to offer effective answers to intractable problems-although I nevertheless remain somewhat sceptical about many areas of psychiatry.

For a start, I've never been able to enjoy a Castella properly since the day I first read Freud and discovered that the dirty bugger thought cigars were really penises. Rubbish.

Churchill used to get through 10 a day, and if Sigmund was implying that our Winnie spent the whole of the Second World War with a penis in his mouth, then I'll go to the foot of our stairs.

Of course, Freud also thought that a flight of stairs was really a penis, so what does that say about the late Thora Hird and her obsession with chair lifts, and her going up and down them all day?

Over that, I shall draw a discreet veil.

(c)2004. Associated Newspapers Ltd.. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.