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Acrophobia

Acrophobia, also called visual height intolerance, is the extreme or irrational fear of heights.

Acrophobia

Acrophobia inducing work situation
Figure 1 - Dangerous work situation in which acrophobia can be disadvantageous (source: wikipedia.org)
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Acrophobia, also known as visual height intolerance or fear of heights, is the intense irrational fear of situations that involve heights such as walking over a tall bridge next to the railing or climbing a ladder. It is treatable with exposure therapy.

Diagnosis

Acrophobia is a very subjective condition, due to people often misjudging their own levels of acrophobia. There exist however a few standardized tests, which have to be conducted by professionals and are usually time consuming, most commonly the test described in the DSM-5 which consists of numerous questions which are then evaluated into a score, describing the severity of the patients acrophobia.[1][2][3]

Treatment

Current treatment consists of exposure therapy. Usage of Virtual Reality technology is advantageous due to no real danger during exposure. [4][5] This makes patients more willing to undergo therapy. [6]

References

  1. H.-P. Kapfhammer, W. Fitz, D. Huppert, E. Grill and T. Brandt, Visual height intolerance and acrophobia: Distressing partners for life, J. Neurol. 263(10) (2016) 1946–1953. ↩︎

  2. C. M. Coelho and C. D. Balaban, Visuo-vestibular contributions to anxiety and fear, Neurosci. Biobehav. Rev. 48 (2015) 148–159. ↩︎

  3. D. Huppert, E. Grill and T. Brandt, A new questionnaire for estimating the severity of visual height intolerance and acrophobia by a metric interval scale, Front. Neurol. 8 (2017) 211. ↩︎

  4. T. Denmark, J. Fish, A. Jansari, J. Tailor, K. Ashkan and R. Morris, Using virtual reality to investigate multitasking ability in individuals with frontal lobe lesions, Neuropsychol. Rehabil. 29(5) (2019) 767–788. ↩︎

  5. A. Landowska, D. Roberts, P. Eachus and A. Barrett, Within- and between-session prefrontal cortex response to virtual reality exposure therapy for acrophobia, Front. Hum. Neurosci. 12 (2018) 362. ↩︎

  6. F. Levy, P. Leboucher, G. Rautureau and R. Jouvent, E-virtual reality exposure therapy in acrophobia: A pilot study, J. Telemed. Telecare 22(4) (2016) 215–220. ↩︎