CHICAGO – Katie Barnickel didn’t always hate bridges.

The 51-year-old Berwyn, Ill., woman experienced her first panic attack in 2001, while driving over a “huge” bridge on her way from Washington, D.C. to New Jersey.

“By the time I got across, my heart was pounding and palms were sweaty,” she said.

During the drive across, she stayed in the middle lane, focused on the car bumper in front of her and avoided any side glances.

She began dreading the return drive two days before she had to make it.

Embarrassed about her phobia, she tries not to let on to others she is uncomfortable even when she’s a passenger.

“I will just look down,” said Barnickel, who works in public relations for a local charity. “I say to myself, “This is stupid, why are you acting like this?”‘

Mark Reinecke, professor and chief psychologist at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, said Wednesday’s tragedy in Minneapolis likely will only reinforce bridge phobia, or gephyrophobia, in people like Barnickel.

“It’s the fear of not being able to return to a safe place,” Reinecke said. “But the likelihood of another bridge falling is no higher than it was last week.”

Moreover, psychologists say Wednesday’s bridge collapse – similar to the section collapse of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake – is sure to spike bridge fears among the public, at least in the short-term.

“A phobia has to be an irrational fear that is inappropriate,” said Jerilyn Ross, president of the Anxiety Disorders Association of America. “If it makes sense, it’s a fear. Right now, (gephyrobics) feel very much like the rest of the population (who ask): Can we trust bridges?”

Ross, who is a licensed social worker, said she’s treated two patients who’ve chosen to ride in a car’s trunk as someone else drives it over a bridge. Tucked away in a trunk produced less anxiety than having to bear witness to the view, she explained.

Barnickel said when she can’t avoid driving over a bridge she will unbuckle her seat belt and open her window, no matter what the weather, in case she needs to escape.

“I just get all yucky,” was how Barnickel described the feeling.

For people already anxious about a bridge collapse, Wednesday’s news reports brought the terror close to home.

“They see this one event on the news, and it causes that anxiety to be triggered,” said Anne Marie Albano, associate professor in psychiatry at Columbia University. “Whether it’s a terrorist attack, or a structural defect, or a natural disaster like an earthquake, to the phobic individual, these things happens more often than not and can happen to them at any time in their mind.”

Albano said she’s treated people with bridge and tunnel phobias, as well as individuals who developed a “subway phobia” in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

“People were trapped in the subways,” Albano explained. “In an individual who is phobic, a way of traveling can be rendered unsafe.”

Experts say statistics for bridge phobia are hard to come by, in part because the disorder may stem from a variety of phobias. For some, the bridge brings out a fear of heights, while others might experience a fear of being confined or a fear of open spaces.

“It’s often not the bridge itself,” said Reinecke.

But the structure is often what its detractors grow to despise. With this in mind, officials in charge of some of the nation’s especially long or high bridges, such as the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in Maryland or the Mackinac Bridge in Michigan, have instituted free “assistance” programs.

Here skittish drivers can pull over and slide to the passenger seat while a bridge staffer drives them across the expanse.

Michigan Department of Transportation spokesman Bob Felt said he didn’t have exact figures, but drivers “occasionally” lose their nerve before crossing the five-mile long, 50-year-old Mackinac Bridge. The bridge, the longest suspension bridge in the Western Hemisphere, connects Michigan’s upper and lower peninsulas. Particularly hairy perhaps is when the road rises to 199 feet above the Straits of Mackinac at mid-span and when high winds kick up.

“On a day when the weather’s a little iffy, I’m sure it adds to the nerves of people who are a little concerned,” Felt said. “They just move over and we’ll take the wheel and cross smoothly and safely.”

For people who can’t confront the bridge, there is reason for hope. Phobias are very treatable, experts say.

A basic technique – exposure therapy – involves exposing the patient to the very thing he or she avoids and fears, said Richard Zinbarg, associate professor of psychology at Northwestern University and director of the Panic and Anxiety Treatment Program of the Family Institute in Evanston, Ill.

“I would take that person to a bridge,” Zinbarg said. “It’s about getting them accustomed.”


One of his patients is handling centipedes as a way to cure her fear of the leggy insects. He began treatment with just photos of the bugs, he said.

Many experts believe people have a predisposition to phobias, psychologists say. Outside factors, like too much caffeine, can exacerbate the phenomena.

To be sure, some phobias, like a fear of snakes or heights, may have made perfect sense thousands of years ago, said Zinbarg.

“Our ancestors didn’t have bridges,” he said.

After the disaster in Minneapolis, Barnickel called her husband, Joe, to the television to see the news footage.

“See, Joe, look at this!” she recalled telling him. “Now he can’t make fun of me,” she said.

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(Chicago Tribune correspondent John Biemer contributed to this report.)

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(c) 2007, Chicago Tribune.

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AP-NY-08-02-07 2017EDT