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The treatment for agoraphobia is much the same as it is for social phobia: cognitive-behavioral therapy and drugs. In many cases, recovery takes longer than it does for social phobias because agoraphobic behavior can become so entrenched. Nonetheless, once therapy and drug treatments get under way, they sometimes move surprisingly quickly. "The best way to treat agoraphobia," says Ost, "is by individual therapy, once a week for 10 or 12 weeks."
If science has so many phobias on the run, does that mean that the problem as a whole can soon be considered solved? Hardly. Like all other emotional disorders, phobias cause a double dip of psychic pain: from the condition and from the shame of having the problem in the first place. Over the years, researchers have made much of the fact that the large majority of phobia sufferers are women--from 55% for social phobias and up to 90% for specific phobias and extreme cases of agoraphobia. Hormones, genes and culture have all been explored as explanations. But the simplest answer may be that women own up to the condition more readily than men do. If you don't come forward with your problem, you can't be included in the epidemiologists' count. Worse, you can never avail yourself of the therapists' cure.
Making things even tougher, phobias are often hard to distinguish from other anxiety disorders. A person who feels compelled to wash or shower dozens of times a day may have a phobic's terror of germs, but a clinician would easily peg the problem as obsessive-compulsive disorder, not a specific phobia. The survivor of an airline crash may exhibit a phobic's panic at even a picture of a plane, but likely as not, the fear is one component of a larger case of post-traumatic stress disorder. Different conditions require different treatments, and without the right care, the problem is unlikely to clear up.
The fact that phobias, of all the anxiety disorders, can be overcome so readily is one of psychology's brightest bits of clinical news in a long time. Phobias can beat the stuffing out of sufferers because the feelings they generate seem so real and the dangers they warn of so great. Most of the time, however, the dangers are mere neurochemical lies--and the lies have to be exposed. "Your instincts tell you to escape or avoid," says Phillipson. "But what you really need to do is face down the fear." When you spend your life in a cautionary crouch, the greatest relief of all may come from simply standing up.
--With reporting by Dan Cray/Los Angeles, Brad Liston/New Orleans, Ulla Plon/Copenhagen and other bureaus
TIME.com ON AOL Take the phobia self-test online at www.time.com/health and if you're still not too scared, send an e-mail to letters@time.com about your own phobias. To chat with Jeffrey Kluger, go to AOL Live at 7 p.m. (E.T.) Wednesday.