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The reception area of the new centre
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Media baron eyes up specialist centre
A SPECIALIST eye centre for children opened for business yesterday (Wednesday)
The Richard Desmond Children’s Eye Centre at Moorfields Hospital in City Road, Finsbury, will be the world’s largest facility dedicated to fighting optical diseases in the young.
Newspaper baron Mr Desmond donated £2.5 million to the £15 million project, which has taken more than two years to complete.
All six floors of the treatment and research centre are colour coded, each with its own unique features, such as a giant games pod.
Moorfields currently treats over 20,000 paediatric cases each year.
The ‘hospital within a hospital’ in Peerless Street has been built adjacent to the City Road site, but is linked to the main building.
There is a direct route into the operating theatres and patients will not be aware they are leaving the children’s centre.
The unit will be officially opened by the Queen on February 23.
Conquer your fears and bend it, unlike Beckham
Sufferers join forces to overcome phobias haunting them for years
David Beckham, the former England football captain, is said to crave straight lines. Cans in his fridge must line up. His white furniture is arranged at right angles and he wears white to match.
Everyone today seems to have a phobia, whether it is pathophobia (fear of disease), glossophobia (fear of public speaking) or pentheraphobia, which is one of the scariest around, the fear of your mother-in-law.
Fortunately, a new organisation, Camden-based Triumph Over Phobia, is offering help for people with acute anxiety, and also for those with the equally debilitating obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).
Phobias and compulsions can affect all types of personalities. At their most extreme, they can prevent the sufferer from carrying out daily activities, even holding down a job.
Little Voice actress Jane Horrocks went through a phase of concentrating on swallowing. Later, it was on how many times she blinked. She only stopped when she had a child because “you don’t have time to be obsessed”.
The Camden centre is part of a national network of self-help groups, founded by Celia Bonham Christie in 1987 after she managed to cure her fear of flying and get on a plane. She later wrote a book about it.
She had professional help from Professor Isaac Marks, of the Institute of Psychiatry in London, who wrote a self-exposure instructions book, Living with Fear (McGraw-Hill).
The Camden group is run by trained lay volunteers, most of whom are ex-phobics or ex-OCD sufferers.
A structured self-treatment, self-exposure programme is followed by group members, using Living with Fear as a self-help manual, and meeting weekly in a supportive group. Members of the group are taught how to “distract” themselves from thinking about their fears.
Development officer for the charity, Trilby Breckman, said: “Our records show that, working in a group, people improve greatly in an average time of five to six months, despite having, in many cases, suffered from a phobia or OCD for several years.
“People are given homework exercises at the beginning. For example, if you are frightened of spiders, and can’t even say the name out loud, you will be told to go home and simply practise saying spiders. Then you would be asked to look at pictures every day and talk about them at group sessions.
“You may be a compulsive hand-washer, suffering from OCD. Your homework would be to record and slowly reduce the number of times you wash your hands at a particular time of day.
“Then you come back to the group and talk about how you got on. It’s helping you face your fears but it is very structured and controlled.”
The group is based at Camden High Street but is not a drop-in centre.
To join, you can write to TOP UK PO BOX 3760, Bath BA2 3WY, ring 0845 600 9601,
email info@triumphoverphobia.org.uk or go to
www.triumphoverphobia.com
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