ANTHROPOPHOBIA: SYMPTOMS, CONSEQUENCES AND TREATMENT - ARTE - 2025

The anthropophobia or antrofobia is an anxiety disorder characterized by experimentation excessive, irrational and uncontrollable towards interpersonal relationships and human companionship fear.

People with this disorder experience high feelings of fear when they are in contact with other people. Likewise, the fact of interacting with other individuals causes them a marked response of anxiety and discomfort.

It is a serious psychological disorder that is especially prevalent in China and Japan. As the main consequence of the disease, there is a remarkable isolation of the subject with respect to other people.

This fact is explained by the discomfort caused by contact with others. People with anthropophobia often choose to avoid all human contact in order not to experience feelings of anxiety and fear.

At present, this type of phobia is a well-studied and well-defined psychopathology. Likewise, interventions have been developed that can be effective for its treatment.

Characteristics of anthropophobia

The term anthropophobia comes from the Greek and literally means "fear of people." This disorder is also known as social phobia or phobia of interpersonal relationships.

The main characteristic that allows defining this psychopathology is the presence of a phobic fear of people or human company. In diagnostic terms, anthropophobia is a subtype of social phobia, so the two disorders are not exactly identical, although they are very similar.

People with this disorder experience phobic fear and, as a consequence, a marked anxiety response whenever they are in contact with other people.

Likewise, these sensations can appear even when the individual is relatively close to another person, even though they are not interacting or communicating with them.

Anthropophobia is a psychological disorder that can develop in people of any age, sex and culture. However, in China and Japan a higher prevalence of the disorder is connoted, which, in their culture, is cataloged through the disease known as Taijin kyofusho.

Consequences

Avoidance is the most common consequence of all types of phobia, since they all cause discomfort when the person is exposed to their feared elements.

However, all phobias differ in severity depending on the characteristics of the feared stimulus. Disorders such as spider phobia, blood phobia or heights phobia, despite sharing multiple characteristics with anthropophobia, are much less serious psychopathologies due to the difference between the feared elements.

Obviously, avoiding contact with spiders or blood is not the same as avoiding contact with people. In early disorders, avoidance behavior is usually relatively straightforward and, in most cases, has little effect on the person's life and functioning.

In the case of anthropophobia, the importance of the feared element makes the phobic fear change completely and seriously harms the life of the individual. People with anthropophobia are subjects who live locked up at home, practically do not communicate with others and avoid any activity that involves contact with another person.

Thus, anthropophobia is a serious anxiety disorder that leads to marked isolation and greatly limits the individual's life.

Symptoms

The most common manifestations of anthropophobia are usually blushing, the absence of eye contact, or feelings of discomfort when the person is exposed to social situations or contact with others.

But the symptoms of this disorder go much further, and in the current literature there is an optimal delimitation of each of the manifestations that it can originate.

In this sense, it is currently defended that the symptoms of anthropophobia are characterized by being anxious manifestations and affecting both the physical plane and the cognitive and behavioral plane of the individual.

Physical plane

The symptoms referring to the physical plane of the person refer to a set of alterations and bodily manifestations that the individual experiences whenever he comes into contact with his feared stimulus.

These symptoms can vary remarkably in each case, but they are all motivated by the same factor: the increased activity of the central nervous system.

Whenever an individual with anthropophobia is exposed to contact with others, they present any of the following symptoms:

1. Increased heart rate.
2. Increased respiratory rate.
3. Palpitations, tachycardia, or feelings of suffocation.
4. Increased body sweating and / or cold sweats.
5. Muscle tension.
6. Headaches and / or stomach aches.
7. Vomiting, nausea, tingling, or dizziness.
8. Feeling of unreality.
9. Pupillary dilation.
10. Dry mouth

Cognitive plane

The symptoms referring to the cognitive plane encompass all the thoughts that the subject with anthropophobia develops regarding their fears. These thoughts are characterized by being irrational and uncontrollable, which is why they appear in the mind of the individual automatically.

Likewise, they are also characterized by being very intense and magnifying the attributes and negative consequences associated with contact with other people.

These symptoms are fed back with physical manifestations, causing a progressive and uncontrollable increase in nervousness and feelings of fear and anxiety.

Behavioral plane

Finally, on the behavioral plane, there are two main behaviors caused by phobic fear: avoidance and escape.

Avoidance is the behavior that motivates the patient to reject any type of contact with others and, therefore, to develop a marked isolation.

Escape, on the other hand, is the behavior that appears when the individual is not able to avoid contact with others, and is characterized by quick and abrupt behaviors that allow the person to escape from the situation.

Differences between anthropophobia, social anxiety disorder and shyness

Anthropophobia, social anxiety disorder, and shyness are concepts that bear certain similarities but are remarkably different.

First of all, it should be noted that unlike anthropophobia and social anxiety disorder, shyness is a normal psychological condition that does not refer to any pathology.

Shyness

Shyness can be differentiated from both disorders by:

1. Shyness can appear early in life and then disappear, which is why it is not always a chronic condition like phobic disorders.
2. Avoidance are behaviors that usually appear little or very mild in shyness and that, in addition, are usually overcome little by little.
3. Shyness does not affect the social, work and interpersonal life of the individual, which can be related in a more or less satisfactory way although it requires some efforts to do so.

Social anxiety disorder

For its part, the differentiation between anthropophobia and social anxiety disorder is more complex. In fact, both disorders are neither the same nor different disorders.

Specifically, anthropophobia is a serious subtype of social anxiety disorder. Thus, while all cases of anthropophobia can be considered as social anxiety disorders, not all social anxiety disorders are part of anthropophobia.

In fact, most cases of social anxiety disorder are less severe than anthropophobia. Typically, social anxiety disorder involves experiencing phobic fear in social situations or performances in public, but does not usually encompass all types of personal contact such as anthropophobia.

Treatment

The treatment of anthropophobia presents great obstacles due to the characteristics of the disorder itself. The individual with this type of phobia fears all kinds of personal contact, so they will also fear contact with medical professionals.

Due to the difficulty of establishing a close and trusting relationship between therapist and patient, the treatment that has been shown to be the most effective is the combination of medication and psychotherapy.

Pharmacological treatment is usually based on anxiolytic drugs, and is usually the first part of the intervention. Through drugs, an attempt is made to reduce the subject's anxiety and thus provide greater capacities to initiate personal contacts.

However, pharmacological treatment alone has not been shown to be an intervention that allows the eradication of anthropophobia. For this reason, psychotherapy is postulated as the second part of treatment.

In this case, cognitive behavioral treatment is usually effective, which provides tools to the subject to learn, little by little, to expose themselves to personal contact and control the feelings of anxiety that this type of situation causes.

References

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6. Spitzer, RL, Gibbon, M., Skodol, AE, Williams, JBW, First, MB (1996). DSM-IV Casebook. Barcelona: Masson.