A really useful article I found while browsing the New York Times might be of interest to you all:

For most of the 100 or so sleepy-eyed people boarding the U.S. Airways shuttle to Logan Airport in Boston from La Guardia in New York on a recent hazy Saturday morning, the 35-minute flight could not have been a bigger nonevent. But that was not the case for about 20 passengers clustered nervously near the gate. Many clutched puzzle books and bags of sour candy as though they held talismans. Some made nervous jokes, others sobbed quietly.

“I have pills with me just in case of an emergency,” said a teenage girl who planned to distract herself on the flight with celebrity magazines.

Mariasol Flouty, a 44-year-old software developer from White Plains, held fast to her Sudoku book. “I had plane-crash nightmares,” she confessed. “I woke up very tense.”

No one was more terrified than Beth Brenner, a 45-year-old mother of two teenagers from Somers, N. Y. “I was hysterical last night,” she said, “but my son said, ‘You’re going to be O.K.’ ” Ms. Brenner was crying quietly on the shoulder of a counselor and staying close to her designated seatmate, Richard Bracken, a retired pilot who had flown for American Airlines for 30 years. “I’m trying to be a father figure here,” Mr. Bracken said.

Several studies have found that up to 40 percent of people have some degree of anxiety about flying, said Dr. Lucas van Gerwen, an aviation psychologist and professional pilot in the Netherlands and an organizer of an international fear-of-flying conference, sponsored by the International Civil Aviation Organization, that took place in early June in Montreal.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, the percentage of Americans who have a fear of flying so intense that it qualifies as a phobia or anxiety disorder and keeps them off airplanes is closer to 6.5 percent. Those most paralyzed by their flying fear — called aviophobia — sometimes turn to programs like the one at Westchester County Airport in New York, run for 10 years by the Anxiety and Phobia Treatment Center at White Plains Hospital. The program culminates with the graduation flight to Logan from La Guardia.

“We have people who haven’t flown for 5, 10, 15 years,” said Dr. Martin Seif, a psychologist in Greenwich, Conn., who created the program, called Freedom to Fly. He himself used to be so scared of flying, he said, that he once arrived late at a conference in Atlanta because he insisted on taking a train, which got stuck in the snow.

People who suffer from phobias inhabit a world apart. “Anxiety is an altered state of consciousness,” Dr. Seif said.

An anxiety or panic attack is often acutely physical, marked by sweating, numbness in the hands and feet, and a pounding heart, leading sufferers to think they are having a heart attack. In such an episode, “the images in your mind feel like they can really happen,” Dr. Seif said.

Exposure-therapy programs like Dr. Seif’s, in which participants face their fear in small doses by meeting at an airport and boarding a stationary plane several times before taking an actual flight, have declined since the World Trade Center attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as airport security has tightened, said several fear-of-flying experts.

As a result, virtual-reality programs — high-tech simulations of the flight experience involving a helmet with built-in audiovisual components — have replaced many more traditional treatment programs like Dr. Seif’s.

According to Dr. Barbara Rothbaum of Emory University in Atlanta, who has studied virtual-reality treatments for fear of flying, the success rate is comparable. Dr. Seif said his program’s success rate, defined as those who take the flight to Boston and back, was at least 90 percent. That is comparable to the success rate for similar programs, according to Jerilyn Ross, president and chief executive of the Anxiety Disorders Association of America.

The Sept. 11 attacks also shifted the equation for aviophobes in more subtle ways. With polls immediately after the attacks showing a spike in people who said they were anxious about or unwilling to fly, true aviophobes “grabbed that as a reason for not flying anymore at all,” Dr. van Gerwen said.

In fact, when prodded by Dr. Seif during the program’s first session in mid-April, many participants conceded that their phobia was driven not by a rational fear of crashing but by their own anxiety, easily whipped into a frenzy by factors like a plane’s height, its enclosed atmosphere and wind turbulence, which can feel hazardous even to hardy fliers.

Together, Dr. Seif said, they would learn to “stay in the situation and out-bluff anxiety.”

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