Young people and "telephone phobia": Anxiety when the phone rings

Omega Plus publishes Dictionary of Fears and Manias by Kate Summerscale, translated by Tran Duc Tri, including 99 phobias and manias. The book belongs to Omega Plus' Biomedical book series.

Fears and phobias are arranged alphabetically in English from Ablutophobia (fear of cleanliness) to Zoophobia (fear of animals), or can be divided into thematic groups such as: body, noise, isolation, touch…

The book takes readers on a journey to understand the origin and psychological mechanisms of obsessions, contributing to excavating the history of human strangeness from the Middle Ages to the present.

The work also offers explanations and some positive, effective treatments for the most powerful fears and hysteria.

Telephonophobia

Doctors at a Paris hospital first diagnosed "téléphonophobia" in 1913. Their patient, "Madame X", was gripped by a terrible anguish at the sound of the telephone ringing, and every time she answered it she would freeze and be almost unable to speak.

A Welsh newspaper sympathised with her plight. “If you think about it, practically every telephone user has it,” commented the Merthyr Express. “This ‘telephone phobia’ is a horribly common affliction.”

In the early years of telephones, some people feared that the devices would give them an electric shock, as Robert Graves did while serving in World War I.

The poet was taking a call from a fellow officer when lightning struck the line, giving him a shock so severe that he spun around. More than a decade later, he said he stuttered and sweated if he used the phone.

Người trẻ và chứng sợ nghe điện thoại: Lo lắng khi điện thoại reo chuông - 1 — Cover of the book "Dictionary of Fears and Hysteria" (Photo: Omega Plus).

George V's widow, Queen Mary (born 1867), remained afraid of making telephone calls until the end of her life - shortly before her death in 1953, her eldest son, the Duke of Windsor, told the press that she had never taken a call.

The telephone can seem like a sinister, disturbing device. It “rings loudly from the depths of the bourgeois house,” the literary scholar David Trotter observes, “to expose its contents.”

Its authoritative ringing was an attack on privacy, sudden and relentless. In Prague in the 1910s, Franz Kafka developed a fear of the telephone, which seemed almost supernatural to him in its ability to separate the voice from the body.

In Kafka's short story My Neighbor (1917), a young businessman imagines that his rivals can hear his calls through walls, as if the device had completely broken through physical barriers.

Now that we have so many different ways to communicate remotely, the fear of making and receiving phone calls is back.

In 2013, a survey of 2,500 office workers aged 18 to 24 found that 94% of them would rather send an email than make a phone call, 40% felt anxious about making a phone call, and 5% were “terrified” at the thought of doing so.

By 2019 the situation seemed to have worsened: in a survey of 500 British office workers of all ages, 62% worried about phone calls.

Some fear that, without a chance to prepare a response, they will sound stupid or strange; others fear not being able to understand the caller; others fear being overheard—in an open-plan office, not only can the person on the other end of the line judge what we say, but so can our colleagues.

The survey's most phone-phobic respondents were the youngest: 76% of millennials (those born in the 1980s and 1990s) said they feel anxious when their phone rings.

In a 2016 Guardian article, Daisy Buchanan explained that she and her friends were not only less accustomed to phone calls than adults, but also more sensitive to their impact on others.

“Millennials’ attitudes toward phone calls are really about attitude,” she writes. “We grew up with so many communication methods at our disposal, and we gravitate toward the least disruptive ones because we know what it’s like to be digitally agitated across multiple channels.”

An unscheduled phone call can feel as aggressive and assertive as it did a century ago: an unacceptably harsh form of conversation.

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