The term is treacherous and sometimes unkind; Graham Caveney imagines taking revenge on it by writing “agoraphobia” in the middle of a page, surrounded by scary white space. In Greek, agora means marketplace and phobos means fear. But the condition is thought of as modern, or as a terror of modern amplitude. Those who experience it are caricatured as horrified by the spaciousness beyond the window. In fact “agoraphobia”, Caveney tells us, “is not so much a fear of going out as a fear of something dreadful happening whilst being out”.
He writes with inside knowledge, as an agoraphobe not a doctor. At 19, travelling home from university for Christmas by coach, he had a panic attack on the M6, his world dismantled by the “horrifying symmetry” of the motorway. An only child, brought up in working-class Accrington, he had always been a little dyspraxic, or “cack-handed” as it was called. But this was new: primal fear – heart hammering, blood pounding, body in revolt. He survived the next three years by staying on campus and living within a 50-yard radius. But to the dismay of his parents, with whom he moved back in after graduating, the condition persisted (“at my most agoraphobic, everywhere outside my front door can feel like that original motorway”). Now in his 50s, he seeks to understand its origins.
