National Emetophobia Awareness Day 2021
National Emetophobia Awareness Day 2021. On March 5th 2014, Rob Kelly, the creator of The Thrive Programme for Emetophobia, launched the first National Emetophobia Awareness Day in the UK. The goal was to raise awareness of the phobia and educate and support sufferers to understand and overcome their fear.
Over the past 7 years there’s been a huge increase in understanding and awareness of mental health issues. Social media has played a big role in this with lots more people feeling comfortable talking specifically about emetophobia. We ourselves created a dedicated YouTube channel in 2014 where, over the years, lots of amazing ex-sufferers have spoken about their emetophobia. Some well-known people have even opened up about suffering from emetophobia, which has really helped increase visibility.
Why should we raise awareness of emetophobia?
Around 5-6% of the population suffer from it, that’s around 16.6 million people in the US alone. A lot of these people don’t know there is a name for their fear.
Sufferers find it hard opening up about it due to fear of being judged, embarrassment and their own self-criticism for having the phobia.
Many doctors and healthcare professionals don’t know about emetophobia, and it is often misdiagnosed as other mental health issues due to its close association with OCD, eating disorders, agoraphobia and some types of depression.
There’s a misconception emetophobia is just a fear of being sick, which can lead to insensitive responses (i.e. ‘no one likes being sick’) and unhelpful therapies. There’s actually a lot of components that make up emetophobia (in fact, very little is to do with just fearing being sick!) These contribute to the sufferer’s daily struggle and the bigger picture of emetophobia as a tough, debilitating phobia needs to be understood.
Today is all about emetophobia.
Today is all about increasing understanding of this phobia. It’s also about recognising your own experiences. Today is a great day to challenge yourself to tell others about your phobia, or celebrate your journey if you’re now an ex-emetophobe.
If you know someone who has emetophobia, this post should help you understand a bit more about the phobia. If you are a family member/partner of someone going through the programme we strongly recommend you also read the book yourself as there’s lots of ways you can support them.
For anyone who doesn’t know…what is emetophobia?
At its core, emetophobia is a pathological fear of being sick, seeing others be sick, or both, which can range from mild to severe. Fearing being sick is just one piece of the puzzle however.
It affects all ages and genders (with a predominance in women) and often starts in childhood.
It can preoccupy the sufferer’s life, as they go to great lengths to avoid encountering anything sickness-related. This means avoiding food, relationships, transport, holidays, pregnancy, school, parties, socialising, childcare, jobs, university to name a few.
Emetophobes tend to experience daily anxiety due to the belief there is always a risk of exposure (not necessarily correlated to how often they are sick – some emetophobes have never been sick).
Emetophobes tend to have low self-esteem, social anxiety, perfectionism and a desire for control.
Sufferers can also experience panic attacks, OCD, eating issues, agoraphobia which might not seem directly related to emetophobia.
Finally…a few things that have changed for us since 2014.
7 years ago we ‘officially’ launched the Cure Your Emetophobia and Thrive programme although we were treating emetophobes before that. Our goal is to help as many people as possible by demystifying emetophobia and providing an accessible and simple-to-follow solution to permanently beat the phobia. So what‘s happened over the past 7 years?
Regular book updates based on user feedback + adding in the latest research
In March 2020 we launched the online course and online version of the book
Book translations into French and Danish, as well as launching a dedicated French-language site www.emetophobe.com
Created Teenage/Young Person’s versions of the book
We created a ‘Thrive Quotient’ quiz specifically for emetophobes. This is the most thorough, comperehensive analysis into emetophobia in the world – why you have it, what’s causing it and how you can beat it
In 2014 we conducted a research study exploring the efficacy of the programme, where all participants had a significant reduction in emetophobia severity, the majority completely overcoming it for good.
In 2017 we conducted a 1646 participant survey into non-emetophobes’ attitudes towards vomit