"No, no, no. I couldn't even stop and look at a problem," says 10-year-old Damien Nemire-Pepe. "It was total panic."
Damien has a fear that at first seems inconsequential. A fear of math.
"But it disrupted our whole family. It was taking over our lives," his mother, Marleta Nemire, says. "This was like a last resort."
This was becoming part of a study on treating childhood phobias that is being conducted by Florida International University's psychology department. The study has been initiated by Associate Professor Wendy Silverman, who, because of previous work on a method to examine anxiety problems in children, has been given a grant by the National Institutes of Mental Health.
"Childhood phobias have not been studied much," Silverman says. "It's a wide-open area."
The common childhood phobias, she says, include fear of small animals, the dark, heights, loud noises, sleeping alone and taking tests.
If they sound the same as those that afflict adults, it's because they are. Evidence indicates that childhood phobias can remain and, even if they disappear over time, still can cause problems later in life.
"Clearly some fears are generic, but then some can come from the child simply hearing something. Fear manifests itself," Silverman says. "But we're not here to get to the bottom of the fear, though a lot of that comes out. We're here to treat it."
Silverman first assesses whether there is a real problem and whether it involves a phobia or something else. She conducts comprehensive interviews with the child and the parent.
"In Damien's case, we had to be very careful in evaluating his (math) problem," Silverman says. "It could have been a learning disability or just anxiousness."
The problem also has to be at the point that it completely disrupts the life of the child and those around him.
"We would go through 45 minutes of screaming and yelling just for him to get to a math problem that would take a few minutes to complete," Marleta Pepe says.
At school, Damien's teacher said she could see the fear in his face, the panic in his eyes, when she went to get the math book out, his mother says.
"I'd scream, 'I don't care if you ground me for the rest of my life. I'm not doing it,"' Damien says about his homework.
Damien is in the midst of the 10-week treatment that tries to gradually get him to confront his fear. He and Silverman set up a list of goals that place the completion of math homework somewhere in the middle and confronting a math test at the scariest end of the scale.
"When we had a child that was afraid of dogs, we used the same gradual-type system," Silverman says. "Get her to think about dogs, then able to look at one through a pet-shop window, and eventually we brought a dog into the clinic here for her to approach."
Each week, the parent and child make contracts that reward the child if a specified goal is met.
"We eventually stop having to reward them," Silverman says.
So far, Damien has been improving steadily. "Instead of starting a huge battle, he's begun to just say, 'Mom, I can't do this,"' Marleta says.
"Once in a while I still freak out, though," Damien says.
Silverman has taught him a method called "STOP" that he uses when confronting his fear. "I say to myself, 'I know I can do this, it's not as hard as I think,"' Damien says.
"He just has to separate math and the fear of math," Silverman says.
The 10-week treatment almost seems too brief to confront something that has disrupted the lives of an entire family. "But it's working," Silverman says. "And it's not meant to just be dropped when they leave; we expect them to continue the methods if needed and we schedule follow-up visits."
"I thought, 10 weeks, what can they do in 10 weeks?" Patricia Diemunsch says. That was her first thought when she brought her son, Francois, 8, to the treatment center.
"He had become afraid of everything; it just got worse and worse," she says. "He wouldn't even go outside to take the garbage out alone. He couldn't be left in the dark at all. He insisted on sleee weeks, they did exercises in which she would start watching TV with him and then walk away for five or 10 minutes. Then they worked on having him go upstairs all by himself for short periods.
"And after each time, I'd have to measure his heart rate to see how frightened he became," Patricia says.
At the clinic, they once had him turn out all the lights for a moment and stay by himself.
"I'm all right now," Francois shrugs.
"The days where I couldn't leave him alone in a room for even five minutes seem to be gone," Patricia says.
The sessions at the clinic were on Thursday nights. Now, if he even begins to act up, his mother threatens to start the therapy again.
"That stops him right away," Patricia says. "Not because he didn't like everybody at the clinic, because he did, but because The Simpsons are on Thursdays. He's more afraid of missing that than anything else."
----For more information about treating childhood phobias, call 1-305-348-1937 at FIU.