In this week’s Newsweek, Ramin Setoodeh talks to Food Network star Paula Deen, the Southern cook who suffered from agoraphobia. Fear of public spaces led Deen to cooking, and is partially responsible for her success today. Take a look at some other famous people who’ve suffered from agoraphobia, the fear of having a panic attack in a public space.
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It’s hard to believe that this bubbly Food Network personality had enough anxiety to make her housebound. But it was Paula Deen’s agoraphobia, which kicked into high gear when she moved from her home in Albany, Ga., to Savannah for her husband’s job, that eventually made her a star. Her fear of leaving the place where she grew up was so severe that she was unable to leave her house. It was there that she began focusing on cooking for her family and eventually started making bagged lunches that her children sold in their neighborhood. She finally got the courage to open her own restaurant and self-publish her own cookbooks. The books got the attention of the major publisher Random House, which eventually led the way to her becoming the lovable celebrity cook we know today.
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Academy Award-winning actress Kim Basinger moved to Hollywood with dreams of stardom but discovered she was uncomfortable with people looking at her body. She wore baggy clothes to auditions, which led to her being passed up for parts. She’s said, according to IMDB, “I used to go home and play piano and scream at night to let out my frustrations. And this led to my agoraphobia.” Basinger was featured in a 2001 HBO documentary called Panic: A Film About Coping, in which she describes her struggle with agoraphobia. “Fear has been something I’ve lived with my entire life, the fear of being in public places—which led to anxiety or panic attacks. I stayed in my house and literally cried every day.” A spokeswoman for the actress recently insisted that Basinger has beaten agoraphobia with therapy, though some have suggested her fairly public custody battle with ex-husband Alec Baldwin over their daughter Ireland was driven by her anxiety-producing panic disorder.
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Agoraphobia is literally translated as “fear of the marketplace,” but it's better described as a fear of being stuck in a place or situation during an overwhelming anxiety attack. The father of psychoanalysis reportedly suffered from agoraphobia when he was young, and one of his first students, psychoanalyst Theodor Reik, believed that Freud’s early agoraphobia was “the hidden missing link” between his earlier psychological interests and his “later occupation with the neuroses.”
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Beloved New York actor and director Woody Allen is notorious for being inhibited by several phobias. In addition to fearing tunnels, showers with drains in the middle, changing his pants while working on a project, and straying from his ritualistic daily breakfast of skim milk, Cheerios, raisins, and a banana cut into seven slices, Allen is at once claustrophobic and agoraphobic.
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Barbra Streisand is known for powerful performances, but one case of forgotten lyrics drove the legendary singer-actress from the stage for nearly three decades. Streisand’s debilitating stage fright stemmed from the moment she forgot the words to one of her songs during a concert in Central Park in 1967. “I couldn’t come out of it … It was shocking to me to forget the words. So I didn’t have any sense of humor about it,” she told ABC’s Diane Sawyer in 2005. “I didn’t sing and charge people for 27 years because of that night … I was like, ‘God, I don’t know. What if I forget the words again.” It wasn’t until the early 1990s that Streisand conquered her fear and returned to the stage once again.
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Emily Dickinson, not unlike many other famous poets and writers of her caliber, was notoriously reclusive. But whether the poet was agoraphobic is strongly debated. While many believe that she suffered from the disorder that produces anxiety over being stuck in an embarrassing situation, certain biographers insist that Dickinson’s reclusion was a conscious choice to avoid vanity and societal pressures.
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Bobby Fischer is considered one of the greatest chess champions of all time, claiming the World Chess Championship four years in a row, from 1972 to 1975. Fischer, who led a controversial life on several fronts, is described as “the most arrogant man in the world” in an HBO documentary released in June 2011. He stepped away from chess after 1975 and became increasingly hostile toward the U.S., famously praising the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Fischer had a hard time coping with his agoraphobia, often not showing up for chess matches if he wasn’t happy with any detail surrounding the affair.
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Author Chuck Palahniuk is best known for his 1996 novel Fight Club, which was adapted for the screen and starred Brad Pitt. Palahniuk has remained mostly quiet about being agoraphobic, but gave one of his characters the disease in his 2000 novel Survivor.
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From Mrs. Doubtfire to Brothers and Sisters, Sally Field has racked up quite the career in her nearly 50 years in Hollywood. Throughout it all, the two-time Oscar winner for Best Actress has battled her fear of crowds and a surprisingly low self-esteem. "I would lose 10 to 15 pounds in a week, eating nothing but cucumbers and working all day,” Field said of her time on The Flying Nun, which aired in the late '60s. "I couldn't take [being out in public],” she said in a 1996 People cover story about her disorder. “I'd have an anxiety attack."
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She was the single mother to Ashley and Wynonna, and with the latter formed one of country music’s most popular mother-daughter duos ever—producing eight top-10 hits and winning five Grammys. Mother Judd suffered from depression and hepatitis C, which forced her to end her singing career in 1991. Judd has tried to be lighthearted about her hard times: “Realize that no one’s ever died from a panic attack and that it passes,” she told others who suffer from panic disorders. In 1998, Judd said depression medication had helped save her life. "I think catastrophe holds the potential for growth. It's not what happens to you in life; it's more about what you do with it." In her 2004 book, Naomi’s Breakthrough Guide, Judd asked readers to "find the sacred meaning of everything that happens to us.”
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The singer and songwriter is one of 6 million Americans who suffer from disabling panic attacks, according to the National Institutes of Health. In 1981, the surefire pop star was so frozen in fear at a concert that fans came onstage to rub her arms and legs to relax her. The next night she didn’t fare as well, collapsing in front of a crowd of 10,000. Simon said during a 2008 interview that she tries to stay focused to avoid panic attacks. "If I can do something that gets me into my immediate sensory experience, that keeps me focused on the right now," she said.
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The French thinker and novelist Marcel Proust was born in 1871 and is most famous for In Search of Lost Time, a book published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927. Proust, who died in 1922, spent much of the final decade of his life in his own apartment in Paris, rarely leaving and writing only at night. Proust is famous for saying: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”
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