Beauty Queen Suffered from Childhood Anxiety

No one who looks at Kirsty Rabjohns, once a finalist in the Miss Wales competition, would think she had emetophobia. Emetophobia is an anxiety disorder which causes an intense, excessive fear of vomiting.

People who have emetophobia are often afraid of people getting sick. This makes them take unreasonable measures to avoid physical illness. Emetophobic people may have a poor social life because of the avoidant habits they develop from trying to stay out of situations that could lead to being sick.

Extreme emetophobia can even lead to the belief that avoidance of many kinds of foods is necessary to prevent vomiting. At this point, the emetophobic person will eat little to nothing. This tends to happen to children with a serious case of emetophobia, like Kirsty.

As a child, she stayed home as much as possible and felt too anxious to leave her bed some days. As a teenager, she was unable to go out and socialize with her peers because of her anxiety about getting sick.

Clink the link to read about what Kirsty did to take back her life and become a  healthy, well-adjusted adult.

Fear of being sick ruled my life; Miss Wales finalist Kirsty Rabjohns obsessively checks food for sell-by dates, has never been drunk and spent most of her teenage years indoors – all because of a bizarre phobia that almost led to an eating disorder. She spoke to Claire Rees about taking charge of her fears.