Bay city’s scare – (Shanghai Star. 2001-11-22) California bridge threat nothing new for gephyrophobics. Several years ago, Caltrans (California Department of Transportation) even started dispatching tow trucks to help those phobic drivers make the crossings, either by providing an escort, or literally pulling the car across.
CROSSING San Francisco’s famed Golden Gate Bridge can be a thrilling experience or an exercise in the heart-stopping terror of gephyrophobia.
For many commuters across the landmark span, the drive was a little more jittery recently after Governor Gray Davis said that California bridges could be targets for terrorist attack.
But for some, the fear of bridges was so acute already that the governor’s warning had little additional effect. Known as “gephyrophobics” after the Greek for bridge, these people have already carved out a confined existence as a means to cope in a region criss-crossed with bridges.
Bridges may be easily avoided in some flat, landlocked places, but not so in San Francisco, a narrow peninsula of land that connects to the north by the soaring Golden Gate Bridge and to points east by the 6.7 km long Bay Bridge, a span that has become notorious among gephyrophobics.
Of just 10 toll bridges throughout California, eight are located in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the State Department of Transportation, known as CalTrans, says it regularly has to deal with drivers who freeze as they approach the on-ramps, too fearful to proceed.
Several years ago, Caltrans even started dispatching tow trucks to help those phobic drivers make the crossings, either by providing an escort, or literally pulling the car across.
“Usually they just wanted the tow truck to drive behind them, because they were afraid they would, to use a non-medical term, freak out,” said Caltrans spokesman Jeff Weiss.
“It’s not an official programme, although some people think that it is. You get some people who drive through the toll plaza and then just pull over to the side and wait for one of the tow trucks to pull them across.”
Help from Dr Fear
“The tow truck drivers got to know one or two of the motorists who would regularly panic,” said Weiss. He said Caltrans is still called on to remove or assist drivers, although it avoids advertising its programme since its resources are so strained dealing with stalled cars and accidents.
Caltrans has also tried to help out by referring panicky drivers to therapists, including one nicknamed Dr Fear, who takes groups of phobics out to local bridges as part of a cognitive therapy based on confronting the fear rather than avoiding it.
There are no good statistics on how many people actually suffer from fear of bridges, since it may manifest itself from manageable jitters to a much more serious condition that eventually leaves sufferers homebound. But doctors say it is one of the more common forms of agoraphobia, a disorder characterized by a fear of open spaces.
The phobia seems particularly prevalent in the Bay Area, where there are many bridges and where there is the added threat of earthquakes to cause people to question their safety.
“Fear of bridges is one of the most common things I see,” said Chad Lejune, a counselor at the San Francisco Bay Area Centre for Cognitive Therapy. He said he has had some patients come in for treatment after getting a job outside of the city. Some confess they have not been over a bridge in years.
A few years ago, Lejune had a patient with no history of gephyrophobia who became extremely anxious one day while driving onto the Golden Gate bridge.
The woman, a journalist whose job required she travel throughout the Bay Area, responded by taking a new assignment that allowed her to stay in the city. Later, she became a freelancer working from home, and eventually stopped leaving her home altogether, Lejune said.
Primal fear
Because the phobia can come on so suddenly, researchers say they do not know exactly what triggers it. But most concur that the only good treatment is to face the fear, which is why living around San Francisco can be both a blessing and a curse for bridge phobics.
“It is harder to cope with the fear here by avoiding it,” said Dr Jacqueline Persons, director of the San Francisco Bay Area Centre for Cognitive Therapy. Persons, who said some drivers cope by sedating themselves with tranquilizers before getting into the car, encourages them to cross little bridges and work their way up to the Bay Bridge that connects San Francisco to Oakland.
If the recent threats – later discredited by the FBI – about a terror attack on a California bridge stopped many residents from making discretionary trips, the bridge phobics tended not to be fazed, either because they had already learned how to cope or just to avoid bridges altogether.
“I’ve had some people who say, ‘I was right. The world is a dangerous place,”‘ said Lejune.
“The fear often does not have a lot to do with the bridge itself. It is just that being in a very high place or on a low span over a body of water seems to mess with your equilibrium. It is not a situation you would find yourself in nature, and something in your brain says, ‘This is not right.”
From the Archives — originally published on the Opelika Daily News on February 10, 2003. View the original page.
