A Welsh teenager who is so scared of Halloween it makes him physically sick is set to try hypnotherapy to get over his phobia. Dylan Andrews from Abergavenny is so scared of the spooky celebration that he gets nauseous when he spots decorations in shops.
The 14-year-old has a little known phobia called samhainophobia, which is a fear of the October 31 celebration. His adverse reaction to Halloween means that he chooses to stay home and avoids dressing up with his friends out of fear as to how he will react.
And his phobia is now so bad that his mum Steffi, 48, has referred her son for treatment - including therapy and hypnosis, reports The Express. Speaking about his unusual phobia teenager Dylan said: "I miss out a lot. My friends go to lots of parties and Halloween really is the best time of the year for teenagers, so it bugs me how I can't enjoy it with them.
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"I feel really sick. It makes me feel so nauseous. So it is upsetting. I hope something, like hypnotherapy, will work. Most things, this time of year, are covered in decorations in town so it is hard to go out."
Steffi said she thinks fear trouble could have been caused by a Halloween stomach bug her son had when he was about six. She said: “I am desperate to help him. He's a confident, outgoing and adventurous boy, and usually very active so it's a shame.
"When he was younger, we went to a restaurant for lunch and it was decorated for Halloween. There were spider webs and skeletons. He had a stomach bug but we were unaware and he was later sick at home. Now he makes that connection. He cannot look at pumpkins, for instance, without going as white as a sheet, and feeling nauseous and sick.”
Hypnotherapy can be an effective method for coping with stress and anxiety. It uses hypnosis to try to treat conditions or change habits.
Dr Martyn Quigley, lecturer in Psychology at Swansea University, said people suffer certain phobias as a result of "traumatic experiences".
He said: "With traumatic experiences, you just have that one event and that can be sufficient for you to show fears of that for the rest of your life.
"So you could go into a lift, and never have a bad experience and then have one bad experience, and that's it for 50 years of your life. It seems odd because you may have had 1,000 experiences in a lift and it takes just that one experience to cause a phobia.
"Simple phobias or specific phobias, as those terms are used interchangeably, particularly tend to occur during childhood or teenage years. Others tend to occur much later in life. You do tend to see them in childhood but they do tend to stick around, so this story is consistent to that.
"The good news is all types of phobias are the psychological disorders which are the easiest to treat.
"There are effective treatments for simple phobias, which are exposure-based treatments. There are a variety of different treatments but the key is a gradual exposure to the thing that person is scared of, in this case, Halloween."
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