Key Takeaways
- Dementophobia is the fear of going insane or losing touch with reality.
- Social stigma around mental illness is less common now due to increased public awareness and understanding.
- Anxiety symptoms and negative thinking patterns can worsen the fear of madness in people with dementophobia.
Dementophobia is a type of phobia that involves the fear of madness or insanity. People who have this fear are afraid that they are going insane or losing touch with reality, or will in the future. The fear may be due to seeing family members who have struggled with severe mental illness or periods of severe stress that exceeded your ability to cope effectively.
Mental Illness and Stigmatization
Historically, mental illness has long been associated with confinement and painful experimental treatments that left you worse than when you started. At various points in history, those with a mental illness were thought to be possessed by evil spirits, and the treatment could be equally painful. These perspectives have contributed to the stigma around mental disorders and the view that it is something to be feared, avoided, or hidden.
Only relatively recently did the medical establishment and the general public begin to recognize mental illness as a treatable medical condition.
If you have dementophobia, there may be additional underlying concerns making the fear even worse. If you have older relatives who went through the early or mid-20th-century asylums, or have seen the documentaries, you may be afraid you’ll undergo the same treatment.
Social stigma arose from centuries of maltreatment of people with mental illness and keeping them out of view from society. There are still plenty of current TV shows and movies that depict psychiatric facilities and mental illness in wildly exaggerated ways that perpetuate the stigma.
Some symptoms of mental illnesses can draw attention to yourself, such as tics, vocal outbursts, panic attacks, and socially inappropriate behaviors. You may be embarrassed by your symptoms and worry about what your friends, family, and even strangers might think of you. What if they think you are crazy?
However, as public awareness increases about the brain and the biological, genetic, and psychosocial causes of various psychological symptoms and syndromes, the more readily people discuss their own mental health openly. The social stigma is far less common than it once was.
The Anxiety Feedback Loop
It is normal to be concerned about health problems that run in the family and it is wise to take precautions. Research shows there is also a genetic component to mental illness, and you may be validly concerned about mental illness(es) that run in your family.
However, with dementophobia, you may become excessively hypervigilant about any symptom you experience with concern that it resembles the same mental illness your Aunt Phoebe had. People say you look just like her after all.
Phobias tend to run in families, partially due to the way our brains are wired, but also because we learn behavior from the role models around us. For example, you may have a genetic predisposition for developing anxiety, but if your Mother jumped up on the kitchen table and screamed every time she saw a spider, you might learn to respond in the same way.
Those with a fear of going insane often exhibit some of the same thought patterns and anxiety symptoms as people with other types of phobias. However, with dementophobia, these symptoms can erroneously reinforce the fear that you are going mad.
Cognitive Symptoms
All people develop patterns of thinking about themselves and the world, but some patterns are unhelpful and will exacerbate your worries. With anxiety disorders, your mind gets ahold of a worry and can turn it into all kinds of what-if questions answered by worst-case scenarios.
For example, you may analyze the meaning of every thought, feeling, and behavior you have, and find yourself labeling them as sure signs of madness. Some examples of negative thinking patterns include:
- Overgeneralization: One negative experience on one occasion is applied to all of the potential occasions going forward. For example, you didn’t get the job after the interview, and you think “I was so anxious I couldn’t even formulate a thought. With my mental health issues, I will never get a job.”
- Mental filter: You only focus on details that confirm your fears but discount all of the evidence against them. For example, you magnify every time you have a setback with life but hardly acknowledge all of the progress and success you make 90% of the time.
- Catastrophizing: You believe any upsets in your day-to-day life confirm your worst fears and you anticipate the worst possible outcomes. For example, when a symptom of stress is believed to be a psychotic disorder. “With this symptom/diagnosis, it will only get worse and my life will be ruined. I might as well check myself permanently into the psychiatric hospital now.”
- Jumping to conclusions: You make assumptions about what others are thinking or making negative assumptions about how events will turn out. “After that incident, I know they all think I’m crazy.”
- All-or-nothing thinking: You have black-and-white thinking where you assume you are either sane or insane. There are no shades of gray. Instead of allowing yourself to have a bad day or normal variations in thoughts and feelings, you think “I never see things the way other people do. It confirms something is wrong with my brain.”
Physical Symptoms of Anxiety
Signs of being over-stressed can also include headaches, sleep problems, stomach issues, difficulty making decisions, general anxiety, and other mental health symptoms. All of these can contribute to the feeling that you are not well.
Physical sensations of anxiety are also concerning to someone with dementophobia:
- Breathlessness
- Dizziness
- Excessive sweating
- Feeling faint
- Heart palpitations
- Nausea
- Muscle tension
- Trouble concentrating
These symptoms can escalate into a panic attack, which is a sudden overwhelming attack of dread and fear with symptoms that can make you feel you are losing your mind or even dying.
Depersonalization and derealization are subjective changes in perception that are extremely common during panic attacks and during times of intense stress or trauma. They can create an uncomfortable feeling of disconnectedness from your body and the world around you. People who experience these symptoms report feeling like they are losing touch with reality, and for the person with dementophobia, this creates a positive feedback loop that reinforces their fear of going mad.
A phobia of going insane can lead to panic attacks, which can also further heighten the conviction that you are, in fact, going insane. Therapy may be necessary to help break this cycle.
Getting Help
If you think you have this phobia and it is interfering with the quality of your life or causing distress, you may want to seek help from a professional. You can be evaluated to determine if you are indeed dealing with some form of mental illness, or if you are experiencing dementophobia. Either way, treatment is available and you do not need to continue to suffer.
Phobias are often treated with a combination of medications and therapy. Therapists generally draw from a variety of cognitive-behavioral and other techniques to help people challenge any distorted beliefs and ultimately develop healthier ways of thinking and acting.
Your therapist may also work with you to explore the deeper meaning that your fear has to you and its origins. Psychoeducation, in which you learn more about this phobia or other specific mental illnesses and their treatment, is often helpful.
The goal of treatment is usually to help you better understand the complex factors contributing to your phobia and learn strategies that will help extinguish the fear or minimize the impact it has on your life.
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Additional Reading
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American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 5th ed., Text Revision; 2022.
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