Mental and Emotional Health: Fear and Phobia

Here's a fun lesson plan I got from another health educator.

Sometimes when we are teaching about mental health disorders, it can get REALLY heavy! my hardest day of the year was for sure the day we talked about suicide. Along with talking about mental health disorders, another thing you can talk about is fear and phobia's. This is also a great lesson because it teaches your student about roots. so here is the lesson plan:

1. Give a student a list of all of the roots:

zoo
thanato
mono
toxico
ailuro
pyro
avio
gyne
xeno
algo
agoro
claustro
astra
hemo
acro
nycto

at the same time you give them what the fear's are and have then guess to see which ones they can match up:

Fear of:
1. enclosed spaces
2. night
3. high places
4. open spaces
5. pain
6. blood
7. thunder
8. strangers
9. cats
10. animals
11. death
12. fire
13. flying
14. being alone
15. poison
16. women

2. then you go through and have fun seeing which ones the students got wrong and right. have a discussion about fears and phobia's and the differences.

Phobia's: persistent, excessive and generally unreasonable fears of stimuli that lead one to avoid that stimuli. Common phobias, such as the ones above, that really pose no real threat or danger, may lead others to ridicule those with phobia's.

3. then you can have students tell you if they think they think this is a sign or a symptom of a fear or a phobia.

(note, these are all phobia's, so you'll need to modify them so some are just fears)

signs and symptoms

difficulty swallowing
sweating
excited stomach
shortness of breath
tense feelings
muscle tension/aches
frequent urination
irritability/impatience
insomnia related to anticipation
fast heart rate/palpitations
nausea
diarrhea
twitching or bodily shakes
inability to relax
dry mouth
sleep difficulty
difficulty breathing
difficulty concentrating
blushing

here's a fun recent example of some of these signs!!

4. it's important to finally have a discussion that the National Institute of Mental Health states that 75% of people with specific phobia's are able to conquer their phobias when treated with cognitive behavior therapy. This is the therapy that looks like this...
say you have a fear of snakes
-think about snakes in your mind
-then, open a book on snakes to read about them and look at the pictures making sure you can touch the pages
-then, buy at toy snake and hold it
-then, go to a reptile store and touch a cage with a snake in it
-finally, when you are ready, have the snake handler pick up a snake for you and hold it in your hands