It lurks in the middle of Palo Alto as a kind of Mt. Everest for agoraphobics: the Stanford Shopping Center.
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For people who suffer from “fear of the marketplace,” malls rank just behind freeways and airplanes among places that provoke panic. Even a perfectly normal person may not enjoy these places, may occasionally feel, “One more Crabtree & Evelyn or Nature Company and I’ll bolt.” To an agoraphobic, the Stanford Center-with 140 stores, 1,300 trees and 200 hanging baskets-really is a jungle.
That’s why Dr. Werner Trabert has chosen it as the cure. Trabert, a psychiatrist at Stanford University (which owns and operates the center), plans to take agoraphobics into this heart of shopping darkness in a series of carefully guided journeys. He is seeking a few of the 20 million agoraphobia sufferers in the United States for a study of this experimental cure.
“Mallaphobia is only one feature of the disease,” said Trabert. “There are rare cases of fear of malls and no other fears. But agoraphobics fear the crowded cinema, restaurant, any place they can’t get out of. . . . It’s fear of losing control.”
Some agoraphobics are so terrified they can’t leave their homes.
“The bigger or more crowded a place is, the more difficult it is,” Trabert said.
According to his theory, if phobics can manage a big mall, that’s half the battle.
Trabert won’t be plopping them into the Gap cold turkey. He plans five sessions of “exposure therapy.” Session 1 will explain the disease, first described in 1871 by Alexander Westphal, a German neurologist, as the “impossibility of walking through certain streets or squares, or possibility of so doing only with resultant dread or anxiety.”
In four subsequent sessions, a therapist will guide the mallaphobic: (1) through the parking lot, (2) standing on the sidewalk, (3) inside a department store, and, finally, (4) into a remote corner of the third floor of a department store.
Along the way, the therapist-Sherpa will measure the patient’s pulse, blood pressure and “skin conductance of respiration,” otherwise known as sweaty palms.
There are those social critics who think feeling ill is a sane response to the ubiquity and banality of malls. Others argue that fear of public places is rational in a world with carjackers, aggressive panhandlers and Just Perverts.
“I wouldn’t call it reasonable; I’d call it understandable,” said Trabert.
But he also argues that someone who can’t handle the mall is at a disadvantage.
He also points out that agoraphobia was described in less difficult times and places than postmodern America. That’s why a stiff dose of the Stanford Shopping Center is what the doctor orders.
“We could start at a low level, but then it would take a long time. . . . This is the worst possible location,” said Trabert. “We start with small steps. We don’t ask them to go to the third floor of Macy’s in the first session.”