Phobias are fears a person has, an unpleasant feeling that occurs after dealing with something a person finds frightening. Phobias can be triggered by multiple scenarios, such as seeing, feeling, smelling or experiencing something scary. Newton High School students answered a survey asking about their phobias. Out of the 125 students who participated, 92% of them said they do have fears and 8% of students said they don’t have any. The most common phobia among these students was acrophobia, the fear of heights, with 35 responses.
Junior Vaden Kumar said he has no phobia and he never has. He doesn’t have a certain reason for why nothing frightens him, it just doesn’t. However, he does have one thing that frightens him.
“I am made uncomfortable by the murder of fish,” Kumar said.
Senior Kian Dussault’s phobia is spectrophobia, which is the fear of mirrors. He said he’s not sure when he became afraid of a mirror, it just kind of happened. Only a few people know this phobia of his and he says it’s a rare phobia to have. A situation he has been in with this phobia is at the carnival in the mirror maze.
“It isn’t the phobia that bothers me, it’s being anxious around mirrors here and there that does,” Dussault said.
Sophomore Zoey Hoskinson has a fear of small bugs like ticks and mites, a fear called Acaraphobia. What makes her uncomfortable about these small bugs is the feeling of them crawling on her in a swarm. This fear of hers started when she got lice as a kid. She was so freaked out by it she didn’t go anywhere. not even school. She said all she could do was wash her hair.
“Any amount of small bugs anywhere near me makes me want to cry and/or throw up,” Hoskinson said.
Sophomore Elyssa Coursey has a phobia of whales and deep water. This phobia makes her uncomfortable because in the ocean, you can’t see the bottom and she doesn’t like the feeling that she may drown. With whales it frightens her how big they are, saying it’s scary to her that something can be that big.
“I became scared of the water when I was really little. I was always scared to go swimming because I didn’t know how to swim until I was like six or seven,” Coursey said.
When Coursey was 13, she saw a whale jump out of the water when she was on a boat, which started her fear of whales. Some of her friends know about this fear and they tease her about it.
“What made me really scared of the water, is my dad did the ‘swim or sink’ thing where he’ll throw you into the deep end and if you don’t come up you don’t come up. I was terrified and so I never wanted to go into deep water again,” Coursey said.
