'psychology' - tagged features

Abortion is taboo for many people all over the world. But what if you have a prenatal test, and find out your unborn child has a serious birth defect? The decision to end a pregnancy can be fraught with feelings of guilt, doubt and failure. A major study recently released in Holland examined those feelings. Radio Netherlands' Barry Thorne investigates the trauma of the medical abortion of a much-wanted child. 

Not sure I have any real phobias, though being a city girl, I'm not keen on total darkness. I prefer to see a bit of light peeping through my curtains and the total darkness of the countryside at night makes me twitchy or a bit of a nyctophobic. I'm also not over-enamoured of earwigs and slugs - but there's no word for that. I once had a boyfriend who was fiercely arachnophobic. First sign of a spider or even a daddy long legs in our living room and he was up the stairs and hiding with the neighbours, while I was picking the little blighter up and dropping it in the back garden. We did however make the perfect phobic couple on a camping trip once. I picked up a tea towel inside our tent, found it crawling with earwigs, screamed, he took the offending tea towel outside and shook it clear of its visitors. He then went back into the tent, found a spider in residence, yelled, I picked it up in cupped hands and deposited it outside. As it was a damp night, there were several of these little incidents in the next half hour.