dental phobia essays

dental phobia essays My intervention is based on "John", a 15-year-old boy who has a phobia of dentists. Other than this, he shows no other mental problems, he has had some unrelated disciplinary problems at school, and also has no fear of doctors or needles. His dental phobia has prohibited him from seeing a dentist in 6 years. He has avoided dental appointments by not turning up, whilst also undertaking strict teeth cleaning behaviours, such as religious brushing, to avoid the chance that he may need dental intervention. He has even expressed a dislike for very hard food as he may damage a tooth, requiring dental intervention. John's parents could not specify the phobia's starting point, only that it had been around ever since they could remember. He has not tried any methods to solve his phobia to date, however his parents have attended dental appointments and offer him support to get through them. These have only produced refusals to get in the car to go to appointments, and to even go inside the surgery. I conducted an interview with John on our first meeting, where I simply talked to him and asked him questions in order to get background information on his problem and gauge the severity of it. There was no specific questions asked, or recordings made. The first scale I used to gauge the progression of John, was the Dental Fear Survey (DFS) presented in Appendix 1. This was administered at the start of therapy, and then again at the halfway point of therapy, as well as at the end. The DFS is a 20 item self-report measure that allows assessment of dental anxiety on three subscales, fear stimuli (items 14-18), physiological arousal (items 3-7), and dental avoidance tendencies (items 1,2"9,10,11,12,13 & 20) (Malouff & Schutte, 1995). Each item is scored with a 5-point scale, with 1 being low anxiety and 5 highly anxious. The higher the score in each section, the more dental anxiety experienced. The DFS is also a very accurate test to administe...