Introduction

Despite recent estimates that there are currently 10 million people in the UK suffering from phobias, there is a substantial and conspicuous gap in existing academic literature and research on this topic.

This book addresses this gap in relation to geography literature, but also extending beyond this field to connect with a wide range of academics, health professionals and phobic ''others'' whose ideas are (re)formed by fear.

In doing so, it provides non-clinical, specifically geographical insights into phobia, of relevance for its sufferers and expands human geographical understandings of the relations between gender, embodiment, space and mental health, via a study of agoraphobia.

This book argues that a critical geographic perspective is better placed to take account of the importance of wider social contexts and relations, and can give a fully spatialised account of the disorder more faithful to the way sufferers actually describe their experiences.

By drawing attention to some of the more unusual ways that people relate to each other, and to their environments, we can illuminate some ordinarily taken for granted aspects of personal geographies.