For example, let’s say, arachnophobia.
I’m pretty sure a lot of people are more or less a bit afraid of arachnids. Then at what point does this phenomenon count as “arachnophobia”? How does the effect of seeing images and videos differ from seeing them IRL? Do arachnophobic people react uncontrollably in some way in these situations?
Same logic applies to other types of phobias such as megalophobia or trypophobia etc.
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First, like many words in English, “phobia” has more than one definition. There’s a clinically defined phobia, a popularly defined phobia, and there are phobia adjacent definitions that are also important to know.
Clinically, a phobia is something diagnosed by a professional in a mental health situation, and is an uncharacteristic fear or hatred of a specific thing. Usually it is diagnosed because a person’s life is consistently and negatively affected by the phobia. With spiders, not liking them crawling on you is fairly normal. Refusing stay in a house with cobwebs and spending an unsustainable amount of money in the process or taking extreme actions (arson is a joke until it happens) is not. Once it is clinically identified, a professional can help somebody through different therapies, coping mechanisms, and perhaps medications.
So in short, fear becomes a “phobia” when a doctor agrees it is messing with somebody’s life because they are taking extreme and uncontrollable actions. The specific reactions to different exposures depends on the person and the method, which is why some kinds of therapy uses these different reactions to help people control their reactions. There is no single answer to this, which is why it requires a professional to clinically diagnose a phobia.
Popularly, a phobia is being afraid of something. This can be self described, but has about as much weight as a self diagnosis of depression: real enough that maybe you should take steps, but not a justification to anybody else. This is probably what you are thinking of happening when you hear “arachnophobia” and people just not liking spiders. It’s dilution is just a consequence of people using the word more freely, for better or worse.
Adjacent terms include the suffix -phobic. While in isolation it basically means “adjective of a phobia”, in materials it means the material repels a different material (hydrophobic feathers gives us the “water off a duck’s back” idiom). But in society, it is a form of bigotry. Being fatphobic does not mean being afraid of fat people; it means having an unreasonable hate or dislike or distrust of fat people and allowing that emotion to affect your actions with people in that demographic, such as a doctor dismissing chronic symptoms of cancer as being caused by obesity.
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