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7 hours ago
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What are you irrationally scared of? What is the thing that, if you see it, means there is likely to be a you-shaped hole in the nearest wall as you flee in panic? For me, it is stray hairs – anywhere, though in the bath or shower is worst. I could throw up just thinking about it. I would also kill a clown as soon as look at one, but I don’t consider that a phobia. It is a well-grounded, sensible protective instinct because clowns are clearly wrong on every level.
We are all, I suspect, scared of, repulsed by, or rendered incoherent with disgust about something that others approach with perfect equanimity. However sensible you are, however sanguine and reasonable, it seems a part of every human brain cannot be content without sabotaging your smooth passage through life. The Fear Clinic: Face Your Phobia, a series somewhere between a documentary and a reality show, is set in a facility in Amsterdam that treats phobics of all stripes with a revolutionary treatment that boasts a 90% success rate. I bet it’s the coulrophobics who resist. Because we don’t want to die!
The treatment involves facing your fear – really facing it, and I mean being trapped in a room with it until you are a broken, gibbering wreck – then being given a beta blocker that minimises your terror symptoms, forcing a mental recategorisation of the experience and teaching your brain that there is nothing to fear.
Twenty people have been selected for this neuroscience-glossed Squid Game. In the first episode, we meet three of them. Ollie has globophobia, a fear of balloons which, now that his children have reached the age of birthday parties full of the poppable, membranous bastards every weekend, is hampering family life. Nicholas is a musophobic, terrified of mice – “I don’t know why they’re here. They’re just horrible little creatures, with that tail coming out of them” – and it is making his life as a warehouse manager awful. And Nina is phobic about being a passenger. She can just about cope with overground train travel but buses and cars are a no-no. She has to drive everywhere, which curtails her social life and presumably makes certain commutes and therefore jobs impractical. She has been known to fight people to get out of their cars.
Ollie is put in “the confrontation room”, which is full of balloons that start bursting all around him until he is a weeping shadow of a man. Then he is given a beta blocker, is told to have a good night’s sleep and informed that he must go back in the room in the morning. Bloody hell.
Nicholas receives similar treatment, except the room contains two mice in what looks, even to me, in whom mice raise no feelings stronger than a sense that the world would be a marginally better place if they were further away from me, a remarkably flimsy pen. “How is it going to make me better to go in there?” he asks. “You have to surrender,” says Dr Merel Kindt, professor of psychology at the University of Amsterdam and clinic founder. I would be demanding evidence of her qualifications before I moved another inch if I were Nicholas and those two tails were coming at me. But he is more trusting and steps in. They run over his shoes. He is not thrilled. When Kindt feels he has suffered enough, he gets his pill and his return date with destiny.
Things go more quickly with Nina. She gets in the car with Kindt, but once it sets off, she forcefully and physically insists on getting out and goes home.
The men are cured. I don’t suppose it matters whether this is wholly down to the drug and neuroplasticity, or if someone listening to the origin stories of their fears – Ollie being trapped as a young child among balloons being maniacally burst by his peers at a party, Nicholas and his pregnant wife living in a flat 10 years ago with a mice-infested rubbish chute nearby – also plays its part.
Will they stay cured? Can it really be as simple as that? Answers come there none. As a programme, it hovers ceaselessly at the border between exploitative and edifying. Just a little more effort, a little more information and a little less dwelling on the sight of people reacting in ways beyond their control to apparently harmless objects and creatures could have sent it easily into the latter territory. As it is, it’s hard to watch without at least some sense that we shouldn’t be. Now, send in the clowns.
