Gerontophobia
Gerontophobia is a phobia of the second kind – a fear for certain situation. Gerontophobia is a fear for growing old. This phobia is typical for teenagers and people at their forties. One shouldn't confuse this kind of phobia to simple unwillingness of growing old, as those are rather different phenomena. One will hardly manage to find someone, who is happy about the fact of inevitable prospect of growing old. Though, there are those who feel okay about this fact and those who are frightened to death with this fact.
People, who belong to second group, are those who suffer from gerontophobia. As it was said before, the typical gerontophobs are teenagers and those, who are in their forties. Besides, men are more inclined to gerontophobia then women. There is such development of this phobia, which is known as a midlife crisis. This crisis is a typical phenomenon in the life of every man.
They lead their common life, they have wives and children, and they have their job and friends they have known for ages. Then, some kind of event occurs and changes everything. That event may be the most common event of the life of any person, but it is able to turn up side down man's vision of life and behaviour. It may be anything: death of close friend, sickness that is typical for man of his age, anything. Though, after that occurs, man suddenly realises that soon his life will come to the end and that he is not a young boy anymore. Right that moment the gerontophobia develops. Man may abandon his family and walk away searching for new emotions and proves that he is not old yet and that there are a lot of thing he is still able to do.
The teenagers' gerontophobia is developed in different ways and have its peculiar symptoms. Usually, the teenagers' gerontophobia is resulted with seeing old people who have some kinds of sicknesses with movement disorder. They compare their active and vivid life to one their grandfather or mother have and get frightened with the fact that there will be a day when they will not be able to visit shops themselves. That phobia is characterised with permanent thoughts about transience of time and coming senility.
Unlike the gerontophobia of forties that is a typical disease of the men, the teenagers' gerontophobia is a typical girls' fear. The teenage boys never think about senility, they have more interesting questions to think about. Girls, on the contrary, constantly care about their age and look. They buy tonnes of rejuvenate cosmetics and use it every day before, after and during the sleep. Girls are always care about the fact that they will be unattractive as they grow older, they have strong belief that the elder they get the uglier they become. As a result - the fact of lying about the age becomes common fact in life of every woman.
Affect of gerontophobia to life of a person may have extremely destructive character. It may not only ruin normal way of life of certain person but also cause a great damage for person's psychic. The compulsive fear for growing old results in total occupation of one's mind with thoughts about senility and death and leaves no opportunity to lead normal, joyful life.