Researches have shown that phobia sufferers constitute the largest group of sufferers of chronic anxiety attacks. In the States alone, there are more than 23 million Americans who suffer from anxiety disorders so severe that they have an impaired ability to function. Eighty percent of them are women.

Heinrich Heine University, in Dusseldorf conducted a research on people who suffer from arachnophobia, the irrational fear for arthropods (spiders, scorpions, ticks and mites). The researcher's original goal was to find out whether it is possible to induce nightmares to people just by projecting a certain film. Forty people participated. They were asked to watch a documentary and write down their reactions, feelings and thoughts on a piece of paper answering to some specific psychological questions which would help scientists and psychologists find out more about what causes these phobias.

According to scientists, there are a number of reasons which may have led to this irrational obsession, although they haven’t yet been clarified.

1) Patients may have had an unfortunate incident as children, i.e. they were bitten by a spider.

2) They may have seen someone close to them being bitten by a spider.

3) Repeated parental warnings “Don’t go near spiders, they 're poisonous,” may have conditioned a child to this faulty thinking.

Various projects are in progress aiming at breaking this fear which according to scientists can lead to fear of other animals as well. This and other fears can be treated by means of virtual reality, a computer-generated artificial world. Patients wear stereoscopic glasses and watch spiders move three-dimensionally across a PC screen. Patients also have a VR-glove, which allows them to move a three-dimensional arm in the screen. Before and after the treatment patients are exposed to live spiders to see whether and how much their fear has receded. In every case patients are cured or have their fear minimized and controlled.

Another way to cure fear is by means of aversion therapy (or direct shock therapy.) Patients are persuaded to approach spiders step by step, stopping when they feel their fear culminate. By staying in that position for some time, the fear recedes and patients are encouraged to approach the feared animal ever more closely. Finally they succeed in touching it and even in letting it walk on them as they realize that there’s really nothing to be afraid of. Hypnosis can also applied to victims who suffer from phobias.

Finally, when all is said and done, patients do have to bear in mind that:

1) Apart from a few scorpions and spiders which are truly dangerous to human, the rest are simply harmless life forms and 2) There are no dangerous spiders in Europe; those live in Africa and other tropical places. Nevertheless, one spider, which can be lethal to young children and old people, is the black widow, which is most commonly encountered in the southern parts of Europe. Also, the bite of the water spider and the brown recluse, seen in the continent, can be harmful and should be avoided. All the rest use poison to kill their prey but their venom is harmless to humans.