Spiders, snakes, heights, crowded spaces, open spaces, dogs, injections, the dark, thunder, lightning, germs and flying.
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These are all quite common causes of persistent disproportional fears, or phobias.
The recent mass shooting in Orlando inside a busy gay nightclub quickly raised discussions around a number of so-called phobias intertwined with one another.
While Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was quick to assure us the shooter must be offended by our “free society”, homosexuality was illegal in NSW until as late as 1984 and Australian same-sex couples still do not have the freedom to marry.
I’m sure many in Australia’s LGBTI community would beg to differ with the Prime Minister about living in a place that embraces their freedoms fully.
Prejudice often includes areas of life such as religion, ethnicity, language, social class, gender, physical ability, age, or sexual orientation and leads to the unfair treatment of people, as do many social phobias.
Culturally created phobias such as homophobia and Islamophobia conjure images of irrational hate, and sit more in the region of prejudice than fear, each also a form of xenophobia.
The effect of phobias seems to be as varied as the phobias themselves.
Someone with a phobia of insects may be overcome with anxiety to the point of incapacitation, yet Islamophobia and homophobia appear to lead to verbal or physical anger from the sufferer.
It has been reported that as many as one in 10 Australians suffer from Islamophobia, a term first coined in Britain in 1991.
Australian film director Dean Francis recently linked Australia’s homophobia with a misguided belief in mateship and said the nation is being “humiliated” around the world by our inaction on same-sex marriage.
Soon we may be the only country among our peers without it.
Early news on the Orlando shooter said he had sought positions of gun-holding-authority, working with security firm G4S and was an aspiring police officer.
Whether this due to his fears or his thirst for power we will never know.
With fear of the unknown a common talking point on many issues, even economic, Australia appears to be trying to balance its phobias into some package that makes some strange sense to the minority of people with the loudest voice.
I think I’m getting a phobia of phobias.