Comment by vector_spaces | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vector_spaces | Hacker News Reader

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I used to have extreme arachnophobia, like strip-naked-run-screaming-if-I-found-a-spider-on-me level arachnophobia. A long time ago I was prescribed propranolol for PTSD by a psychiatrist specializing in trauma. I hadn't even mentioned my arachnophobia to her or any clinician I had seen at that point. It helped me a lot of social situations, but the effect was pretty subtle.

Anyway, one day, I was hiking with friends, and someone pointed out I had a bug on me. I picked it up and realized it was a spider -- and then it dawned on me that I wasn't afraid of it at all. It was one of the most thrilling moments of my life to hold a spider without any fear at all. I started seeking out spiders to handle them. Even after I stopped taking that medication, the effects lasted. Nowadays I love spiders.

I learned years after stopping taking it that this medication has been studied both for PTSD and phobias -- specifically arachnophobia.

Your comment made me think to tell this story because I pretty much always attempted to bring spiders outside rather than kill them despite my fear. My rational side knew that most spiders are harmless, sensitive, and highly beneficial creatures. Plus I always hated killing anything and still do. But the exposure didn't actually reduce my fear of them noticably. And that experience is borne out in the research -- exposure therapy doesn't seem to be enough for most people

Apparently propranolol is effective because it works on memory consolidation -- more or less it helps with overwriting old negative memories (more specifically the emotional charge that accompanies the memory) with newer positive ones.

https://youtu.be/uO8pXtvxAA0?t=1893

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/opinion/sunday/a-drug-to-...

People with arachnophobia should remember that 95% of the extant spiders are totally unable to pierce the human skin. Fangs too weak or short to reach blood capillaries and made any real damage, even if they would be poisonous doesn't matter. Those that coevolved with spider-eating monkeys are the problematic ones.

I couldn’t care less whether the spider is dangerous or not.

It’s more the erratic, jittery movements of spiders and their multitude of fast legs that’s off-putting.

Especially when you’re taking a dump in a dimly-lit outdoor toilet and notice there’s a hand-sized huntsman spider a few inches from your knees. I have never sprinted so fast.

So there's still 5% of spiders that can pierce your skin and inject stuff? That's not very reassuring

According to this report, you have roughly 1 in 50 million chance of death by spider.

https://www.wemjournal.org/article/S1080-6032(97)70944-X/pdf

So I wouldn’t worry too much about it.

Death doesn't have to be a reason to dislike being bit by a spider. A bite from a tiny little brown recluse is no laughing matter.

True. A bad bite, anyway. Most bites are not bad. The Wikipedia article is informative (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_recluse_spider#Bite).

My understanding is that most people never see a brown recluse, even within their natural range. Those who do see them probably don't recognize them most of the time, because they're not especially big, because from a distance they look pretty much like any other brownish spider, and beause neither the human nor the spider generally want to get close enough to make a positive identification possible.

But it so happens that I've seen a lot of them, so I offer some trivia about that.

I saw hundreds when I was 12 and my father and brother and I were hired by a neighbor to tear down a shack on his property. It so happened that there were hundreds of recluses in the shack. I know because I was nerdy twelve-year-old with a fascination with wildlife and field guides, and I had a pretty nice little field guide with a good image and description of brown recluses.

I've seen many more of them in the house I live in now. I've been in this house for about fifteen years now. There are a lot of brown recluses living in it. I've seen many dozens of them over the years. The last time my daughter came to visit us, she found four or five of them during the week she was here. She's a little arachnophobic, but not too badly, and the experience hasn't diminished her enthusiasm for visiting We expect her to be back in a few months.

According to Wikipedia and other sources I've read, they rarely bite--generally only when they're being mashed against someone's skin hard enough to frighten them but not hard enough to kill them. When they do bite, it rarely causes any symptoms. When it produces symptoms, they're usually minor--most often sores on the skin; less often some necrosis of the skin.

The bite _can_ cause much more serious symptoms, but that's rare.

I had a bite once living here that might have been from a brown recluse. My doctor was skeptical, because the bite didn't look quite right. It produced a small, tender sore and a really large inflamed area around it. I didn't notice it at all until a relative noticed it on my back. That's consistent with reports of brown recluse bites: most often people don't feel the bite when it happens. Their fangs are quite small--usually they aren't able to pierce fabric--and the venom itself is painless; it's the later effects--if any--that become painful.

At any rate, I and my relatives seem to have reconciled ourselves to living with a large infestation of brown recluses.

Yeah, as I mentioned in my post, I knew this rationally but it didn't help my phobia. If phobias could be rationalized away I suspect many if not most people who have them would overcome them fairly easily

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