Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/04/03/treating-kids-phobias-in-thr.html
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That’s cool that teaching direct “a mile in their shoes” empathy for an animal could remove a phobia. Any chance we could similarly get some Republicans to live several years under a collapsing economy and government, cross a desert with a vicious loan-shark and then be separated from their families and thrown in a razor-wire camp to get over theirs?
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…for science!
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While there’s a definite empathy deficit there, it’s mostly schizophrenic delusion:
Which, obviously, many of them do. But instead, they are convinced that they are Galtian supermen negotiating their way to immense wealth, if not for being held down by the evil government, that brown people live lives of luxury with special “brown-people welfare” that is totally separate from the welfare they’ve suffered under in the past, and that latinos are blasting across the border mowing down legions of border patrol agents with their Mad Max road warrior vehicles of doom, paid for Jew-orge Soros.
Anyway, I’m saying, “screw therapy; drug them up on anti-psychotics.”
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Wonder if this applies to the fear of clowns? Asking for a friend…
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Their sample sizes are, by definition, too small.
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I did cure my crippling panic disorder/agoraphobia and OCD in about a week with motivation. Oh it wasn’t completely gone but I was able to overcome it for a dream job out of state. Flying cross country and getting over my rituals was not easy but I did do it. They eventually creeped back but was able to shove them down over the years. The Xanax addiction was harder to get over, let’s hear it for late 80s therapists shoving addicting drugs as solutions.
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Maybe you could start the empathy round by making balloon animals for a room full of sugar raging toddlers, then have someone stiff you for 50 bucks?
Also: actual, non ironic warning, avoid any video trailers of the new Joker movie. Not pleasant for folks with your friend’s concerns, not pleasant at all. Just sayin.
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A 3 hour ride around your city in a clown car should do the trick. 
ETA: I’m ok with clowns and even I would not want to take that ride.
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I’m with you on the mileage varying tremendously. Enough so that I’m not with you on the ‘works’ bit.
Single most profoundly useless flavor of talk I’ve ever had the displeasure of trying; were it not for the fact that the literature tends to provide favorable efficacy numbers I would have assumed it was some kind of hostile caricature of psychotherapy rather than an accepted technique.
Are you kidding? You just described life in Washington.
Sorta related. An interesting study that experimented with combating the physical fear response though a drug that inhibits the formation of sense memory (I’m sure I’m oversimplifying that, but it’s fascinating to me): https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/opinion/sunday/a-drug-to-cure-fear.html
“This is not “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” the movie in which a dysfunctional couple decides to erase their memories of each other and start their lives all over again. To the contrary, you still remember your biography, but your fear would be stripped of its force. The subjects knew perfectly well after the study that they previously feared spiders and that they now — strangely — felt little to no anxiety around them.”
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