Fear of long words: what is the name of a phobia and how to treat it?

If you are not afraid when reading the word hippopotomus monstrosesquipedaliophobia, then you, fortunately, have passed this unusual and strange disease. Its name is a kind of test to identify a phobia that every 20th inhabitant of the Earth experiences. This is one of the most surprising phobias - the fear of long words. There is also a shorter, synonymous name for this phobia - seskippedalophobia.

The disease is caused by an object or event recorded by the amygdala of the hippocampus as dangerous or even fatal. Further, the human body reacts as if the same phenomenon is inevitably repeated. A patient with a severe form of the disease falls, as they say, into the "captivity" of his feelings of anxiety and panic, experienced by him at the thought or the sight of words "dangerous" for him.

In the list of numerous phobias, seskippedalophobia takes place mild psychological disorder, representing a fear of irrational origin in front of long words.

Hence, the desire arises to use short sayings in communication, to concisely express your thoughts. Respectively, for the thinking of a sick person, the search for short words and expressions is an additional burden, often increasing the fear of mistakes and the consequences of the disease.

The severity of the disease and the quality of its manifestations are different and often acquire individual characteristics.Some people are afraid of long, big words and their combinations, the meaning of which is not always clear to them. Others begin to experience anxiety and fear when trying to use well-known, not particularly long words.

If a person is a professional teacher, and his curriculum is replete with a variety of terms, then this leads to serious difficulties in his work, up to the desire to change his profession. The situation is similar with medical workers, where many complex and long terms are encountered.

The main causes of the disease include the occurrence of traumatic situations of various kinds, which, having appeared once, can be fixed in consciousness. Gradually problematic situations become phobias, significantly worsening the quality of human life in almost all its spheres.

Often the patient is afraid of reactions from the environment to the fact that he makes mistakes in the pronunciation of certain long words. Typically, this fear is characteristic of adolescents, who are especially vulnerable to their peers and those close to them.

The child becomes withdrawn, experiencing his shortcomings, he often perceives the teacher's questions with irritation and refuses to answer at the blackboard. Conflict situations often arise in which the child cannot explain the real reason for his behavior.

The causes of the disease can be:

• self-doubt;
• bad experience of the past;
• a high degree of dependence on the opinions of others;
• traumatic situations experienced in the past (especially in childhood);
• constant ridicule of the child;
• fear of loss of social status;
• biological aspects (in some cases, the disease may be due to heredity and other reasons, for example, with stuttering);
• fear of becoming funny in the eyes of the environment.

Constantly experiencing internal complexes, the patient becomes extremely dependent on the judgments - even erroneous - of the people around him. Gradually, with the course of the disease, the patient is increasingly thought of his incompetence and lack of proper professionalism. An inferiority complex begins to dominate.

The desire to avoid a potentially dangerous situation becomes habitual for the patient and leaves an imprint on all his behavior. Hearing complex verbal constructions, he experiences bouts of inexplicable fear. At the somatic level, the disease makes itself felt:

• attacks of panic terror;
• shortness of breath and sweating;
• rapid heart rate;
• fainting;
• a feeling of tremors in the hands and dry mouth;
• dilated pupils;
• discoloration of the skin;
• the occurrence of nausea, headache, difficulty breathing.

Embarrassed by his awkwardness, the patient loses the ability to think reasonably, feeling all-consuming powerlessness and inability to master the traumatic situation.

With hippopotomistroseskippedalophobia, the intellectual level of a person does not decrease. Individuals, independently analyzing their fears, courageously and successfully overcome this unpleasant disease. Others need professional help.

Often, faced with such a problem, patients believe that the best way out of a traumatic situation will be to exclude words that are "dangerous" for them. However, this technique only exacerbates the situation, since inferiority complexes begin to develop, depressive states and neuroses appear, and the disease continues to progress.

Such conditions are especially dangerous for children. Lack of timely treatment can lead to the exclusion of a child from school for reasons of academic failure.

A feature of the disease is that it progresses very quickly to an active form of development.

The need to regularly overcome debilitating panic attacks, nausea and headaches exhaust the psyche and lead the body to physical exhaustion. This provokes the emergence of chronic diseases of a somatic nature, blood pressure rises, human organs cease to function normally.

Potentially, a phobia of long words can lead to the emergence of other phobias, complicating the overall picture of the disease by the emergence of new objects of fear.

As a mild mental form of the disorder, hippo monstroseskippedalophobia is dangerous in its consequences, especially in the absence of timely and qualified treatment.

Medicines in this case, as a rule, are not used. However, in advanced and severe cases, as a means of relieving exacerbations, the following can be used:

• tranquilizers: tenoten, afobazol, trioxazine, phenazepam;
• antidepressants: autorix, reboxetine;
• hypnotics: zolpidem, relaxon;
• antipsychotics: eglonil, chlorpromazine, clopixol.

Self-treatment without medical supervision can lead to unpredictable consequences that cause serious disorders.

In the absence of any complications, several sessions of psychotherapy are quite enough. The following are popular among practitioners today.

• Psychotherapy - the reasons for the appearance of fear are revealed. Then they are worked out at a deep subconscious level.
• Psychocorrection involves modeling special situations, overcoming which the patient gets rid of the disease.
• Hypnosis involves the introduction of the patient into a trance state, in which the psychotherapist fixes the installation on the patient's correct response to irritating objects.
• Auto-training consists in regular autogenous training, which reduces the level of stress on the patient. It is used as an adjunct to other methods of treatment.

The self-cure algorithm (for mild forms of the disease) includes:

• identification of the prerequisites and causes of the disease;
• performing a set of exercises for pronouncing "dangerous" words according to the system "from simple to complex", gradually;
• active training under the guidance of an experienced speech therapist in the pronunciation of tongue twisters.

The process of stable memorization of tongue twisters and expressions should be observed constantly and daily, including using a mirror. This greatly strengthens the patient's self-confidence, developing the necessary automatism in the pronunciation of "dangerous" phrases.

In this case, fixed expressions must be pronounced without errors. Don't try to speak at a fast pace pronunciation of phrases should be clear and correct.

Hippopotomone monstrosesquipedaliophobia is not a sentence, the disease can be overcome on your own, having previously and in a timely manner enlisted the support of qualified specialists.

For 10 unusual phobias, see below.