FOR SOME, IT'S A BRIDGE TOO FAR
For those with a debilitating fear of driving over the spans that crisscross the bay, getting around can become nearly impossible
Jill Herschman used to work in San Francisco and commute every day from her home in Berkeley across the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.
But one day in 2001, she was driving across the bridge when she suddenly found it difficult to breathe. Her chest grew tight. Her blood began pounding in her ears. She kept driving, but her hands were gripping the steering wheel. At any moment, she felt, she could lose control and plunge over the side, falling hundreds of feet into the water below.
Herschman, an accountant, started working from home, unable to handle the commute. A few years later, she took a job in Oakland. No more bridges.
She has never driven across the Bay Bridge’s
new eastern span. For the past eight years, in fact, she hasn’t driven across a bridge at all.
“I just don’t do it anymore,” she said.
Herschman suffers from gephyrophobia, or an irrational fear of bridges, an anxiety disorder that therapists say is not uncommon and that in many parts of the country has little effect on sufferers’ lives. But in a region where water — and bridges — are everywhere, it can have a profound impact.
“The thing about the Bay Area is that in order to function at any level, it’s usually necessary to drive over a bridge, so it can be quite limiting,” said Michael Tompkins, a psychologist at the San Francisco Bay Area Center for Cognitive Therapy, who has treated patients with the disorder.
Tompkins has seen people lose a job or refuse one because it forced them to cross a bridge. And he’s had patients whose fear prevented them from visiting family members or stopped them from traveling outside the area.
Though there are few statistics on how many people suffer specifically from gephyrophobia, several area psychologists said it’s fairly common to see patients who suffer from the phobia. And, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, roughly 9% of adults in the United States have some type of phobia or irrational fear.
Some commuters who are not phobic are already nervous about crossing certain Bay Area bridges, like the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge — an especially high and narrow span — that’s been plagued lately with pieces of concrete falling onto motorists’ cars. But a fear only becomes a phobia when a person begins to change behavior as a result of the fear, said Avigail Lev, a psychologist with the Bay Area Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Center.
“A phobia only gets developed when someone is avoiding something,” she said. “If you’re terrified of a bridge but keep driving on the bridge, it’s not a phobia.”
Fear can grow insidiously inside the brain, Lev said. Gephyrophobia often starts with avoiding a particular bridge, then generalizes to most or all bridges. The fear can morph into an even broader fear that leads people to stick to surface streets because freeways lead to bridges, or even to stop driving altogether. The more someone avoids a fear, she said, the worse it gets. It can often be associated with agoraphobia, a general term for the fear of a particular situation that makes someone feel trapped, helpless or embarrassed, such as flying in an airplane, taking elevators, using public transportation or being in a crowd.
“It can lead to full-blown agoraphobia, where someone doesn’t leave the house at all,” Lev said. “When you’re avoiding something, it becomes scarier and scarier and harder to do.”
When the stakes are low, people may live for years without seeking help, said John Montopoli, a licensed marriage and family therapist at Pacific Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, a psychotherapy center. If they don’t need to cross a bridge to get to work or have relatives on the other side of the bay, it might be easy to adjust their life in ways that allow them to avoid confronting their fear.
From 2002 to 2003, when Herschman’s brother was sick in the hospital, she managed to brave the bridge to visit him. Then once, in 2011, she had a client in San Francisco she couldn’t afford to lose, so she visited the client there, driving over the bridge for a meeting, and it was torture, she said.
But since the advent of Uber and Lyft, she’s been able to hail a car when she needs to get across the bay, closing her eyes and taking deep breaths all the way. Sometimes she takes BART. Her fear is not as bad when she’s not driving, she said, maybe because she’s not the one at risk of losing control.
Herschman’s family and friends all live in the East Bay now, she said. And while she still does some freelance accounting work for clients around the Bay Area, she refuses any work that will take her into San Francisco.
“So, in that sense,” Herschman said, “it doesn’t really impact me.”
Unlike New York, Michigan and some other states, where some bridges have services to drive people’s cars over bridges if they’re afraid that doing so themselves might induce a panic attack, the Bay Area has no such program. Caltrans will tow a car if it gets stuck on a bridge, for mechanical or any other reasons, said California Highway Patrol Officer John Fransen.
“It happens more often than people might realize,” Fransen said.
Other times, an officer may drive behind a person to make sure that person gets across the bridge safely. Such was the case two years ago, when North Carolina resident Torri Forbes was visiting San Francisco, only to become paralyzed when she tried to cross the Golden Gate Bridge. She doesn’t always panic when driving over bridges, she said, but there was something about the height of the Golden Gate, the wire cables and tall towers that terrified her.
“The bridge is so majestic,” Forbes said. “It overpowered me. I’ve never experienced anything like it.”
Forbes pulled over in a turnout on the northbound approach to the bridge and called her two sons for support. That’s when Golden Gate Bridge patrol Officer Jose Sanchez showed up. Seeing her distraught, he coached her through the drive over the bridge, reassuring her that he would be right behind her with his lights on to make sure she was safe.
“It was just that little bit of security I needed, knowing I didn’t have to go fast and that somebody was with me,” she said. “I drove over, but really slow, and I was crying and screaming the whole time.”
For Josie, a woman with a bridge phobia who did not want her last name used for fear it could affect her job, avoiding bridges wasn’t an option. An interior designer in the building industry, she has to drive all around the Bay Area to visit job sites. Moving here from Colorado 16 years ago, she was instantly captivated by the San Francisco Bay and the way it dominated the landscape.
It wasn’t until eight years ago, however, after she had lived in the area for nearly a decade, that the phobia set in. She had just changed jobs when, driving over the Bay Bridge one day, she suddenly felt as if the ground was slipping away. The periphery of her vision started to go white. She could barely see. She was shaking, her body warm and pouring sweat.
“It just feels like the world is slipping out from underneath you,” Josie said. “It’s really awful.”
She started taking long, circuitous routes to avoid crossing bridges. Once, she thought she could drive through Solano County to get from the East Bay to Marin, only to find herself crossing Highway 37, which doesn’t look like a bridge on a map but is elevated as it crosses the Napa River slough. She kept driving, at 20 mph, knuckles white and clutching the steering wheel. She put on her hazard lights and tried to breathe.
“I just kept thinking, ‘What if I pass out now? How many other lives am I endangering?’ ” she said. “Nothing is more terrifying.”
Within a couple of months, it was so bad she knew she would either have to quit her job or get help. So she decided to face her fear and went to Lev.
Managing phobias is not about eliminating discomfort, Lev said, but developing a willingness to have uncomfortable thoughts and feelings. In other words, embracing the discomfort, rather than avoiding it.
For most people, Montopoli said, that means undergoing a treatment called exposure therapy, which involves gradually desensitizing patients to what they fear. Montopoli, for example, might begin by having his patient look at a picture of a bridge, then drive near a bridge. Then Montopoli might drive his patient over the bridge, then sit in the car while the patient drives, and so on, until the phobic person has learned to manage the thoughts that lead to fear.
Josie manages to drive over bridges now by separating her mind from her body, she said. She acknowledges the fearful thoughts as thoughts that are not objective threats to her life or limbs. She looks for evidence in her environment that she is safe and not in danger. And she said she practices compassion, accepting in herself a moment of vulnerability.
The result? “Freedom,” she said. “I can show up and live the life I want.”