CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews The Fear Clinic: Face Your Phobia on Channel 4: Who knew you could have a phobia of ducks, string and peanut butter?
The Fear Clinic: Face Your Phobia (Ch4)
Some people are afraid of string. Seeing a ball of twine brings them out in a cold sweat.
Don't believe me? Get knotted - it's a recognised medical condition, called linonophobia.
The clinical names for irrational fears are as bizarre as the symptoms.
Koumpounophobia is fear of buttons, arachibutyrophobia is a terror of something sticky like peanut butter on the roof of your mouth, and lutraphobia is fear of otters, of all things.
Xanthophobia is fear of the colour yellow, while porphyrophobia is brought on by purple.
Coulrophobia is common, even if the word itself is not: it's fear of clowns. A related condition is pupaphobia, the fear of puppets.
My favourite of all the words, though also the one I suspect most of being a hoax, is anatidaephobia... a fear that somewhere, a duck is watching you. Donald - stop staring, it's rude.
In Amsterdam at The Fear Clinic, a young British woman called Nina was trying to overcome amaxophobia - her fear of being a passenger in a car.
She's fine in the driving seat but sit her in the back and Nina has to be physically restrained from throwing herself out of the vehicle, even if it's moving.
In Amsterdam at The Fear Clinic, a young British woman called Nina was trying to overcome amaxophobia - her fear of being a passenger in a car. Pictured: The clinic's founder, Dr Merel Kindt
Dr Merel Kindt claims the tablet 'alters the way emotional memory is stored in the brain' during overnight sleep. 'It feels like magic but it's based on science'
Most phobias are irrational, even if they're easy to understand. But Nina's fear was rooted in something much more real.
As a child, she was once an unwilling passenger in a car being driven at more than 100mph.
That could make anyone nervous. This six-part series touts the Kindt clinic in Holland's capital as something unique that offers groundbreaking therapies.
In fact, the resident psychologists do little that you haven't seen in filler segments on morning television, where people are encouraged to 'face their fears' by stroking tarantulas or letting rats perch on their shoulders.
The only difference here is that, in addition to calm encouragement and positive suggestions from the shrinks, patients are given a beta blocker to slow their heart rate after confronting their phobias.
That seems spurious to me. The clinic's founder, Dr Merel Kindt, claims the tablet 'alters the way emotional memory is stored in the brain' during overnight sleep. 'It feels like magic but it's based on science,' she explained.
If that's true, you would expect that a side effect for all patients on beta blockers would be the evaporation of any phobias, which is not the case.
Dr K doesn't pretend the treatment always works. Nina, in the back of a car being driven at bicycling speed through the Amsterdam streets, got into such a state that she had to give up.
But two other patients enjoyed more success. Nicholas, a warehouse worker who felt faint at the sight of mice, became so blasé about rodents that he was happy to let them run up his trouser leg.
And young father Ollie overcame a phobia of balloons that made toddlers' birthday parties a torment for him. Mind you, what parent isn't terrified of toddlers' birthday parties?
