Phobic nature of social difficulty in facially disfigured people

Abstract

Background: Over 390,000 people in the UK are disfigured. Facial disfigurement distresses sufferers markedly but has been studied little.

Aims: To compare fearful avoidance of people with a facial disfigurement with that of a group of patients with phobia.

Method: Comparison of Fear Questionnaire agoraphobia, social phobia and anxiety depression sub-scale scores of 112 facially disfigured people (who scored high on Fear Questionnaire problem severity in three survey studies) with those of 66 out-patients with agoraphobia and 68 out-patients with social phobia.

Results: Facially disfigured people and patients with social phobia had similar Fear Questionnaire scores. In contrast, facially disfigured people scored lower on the agoraphobia sub-score but higher on the social phobia sub-score than did patients with agoraphobia.

Conclusions: Facially disfigured people with psychological difficulties resembled people with social phobia on Fear Questionnaire social phobia, agoraphobia and anxiety/depression sub-scores but were less agoraphobic and more socially phobic than were people with agoraphobia. Facially disfigured people thus appeared to be socially phobic and to deserve the cognitive--behavioural therapy that is effective for such phobias.