Men Suffer Agoraphobia Too

In the early days of The Open Door (TOD) it was thought that as many as 90 per cent of agoraphobics were women. Now it is recognised as being around 75 per cent.

In the 1960s when I started TOD all our publicity was through women's magazines, with articles such as 'A prisoner in her own home', accompanied by photographs of a middle-aged woman peering anxiously through her net curtains. Programmes such as Woman's Hour featured such women, and all the agony aunts in the women's magazines reassured sufferers from panic attacks and agoraphobia, referring them to TOD and the other phobia organisations then springing up. No one seemed concerned about any men who might be experiencing the same problems until the 1970s, when the media began to acknowledge this.

At last, newspapers, radio and TV featured male agoraphobics and how their lives were affected by the condition. At once the phobia organisations began to hear from more and more men, many of them in their early twenties, which was a surprise to some of us. Until then, agoraphobia been assumed to be a female disorder.



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