This is the first time I'm sharing this with anyone. I never told a soul while I was going through this. I just want someone to hear it now.

I have an unbelievably severe specific phobia of catching one specific disease (that's not really what it's of, but it's a good analogy). I would rather die than catch this disease. No question. Yes, it's that unbearable and disturbing to me. I am that fucking terrified. My fear is not of dying, it's of experiencing/having the disease itself. The funny thing is that I have never been exposed to anything that causes the disease.

I had come up with various scenarios where I would be forcibly infected with this disease while being held in some way (as a captive, slave, etc.) and would not be able to either get treatment or kill myself. So I decided, if I kill myself now (at that time) then I can ensure I will never ever catch this disease and be in that situation. There were multiple ways to ensure I would never experience the object of my phobia, but only one was easily available to me at that time - being dead - and I was going to take it. I didn't actually want to die, I just needed to ensure I'd never get infected, even if that meant death.

Pretty soon, I was having at least hourly thoughts of how I was going to kill myself. This went on for 3-4 years. But I hoped to fix the problem via medical treatments you can get to make sure you don't ever catch the disease, and that's what I did as soon as I could.

The treatment essentially changed my life. It was like flipping a switch. I went from living in a state of absolute, unvarnished terror...to feeling basically normal. I haven't thought about killing myself since then either. I went from having multiple panic attacks a week, to one a year. It seems unreal even to me that a treatment could make such a difference, but it did. I'm so far removed now (both time-wise and in terms of my mental state) that I had to look through some old journals to even write this post.

More recently, I was looking around online, and I found that these feelings aren't uncommon among people who have very severe specific phobias. I've seen people express "I need to make sure I will never experience [object of phobia], or I'm going to kill myself". But I haven't seen anyone else yet who was actually suicidal for an extended period of time because of a specific phobia. I would be curious if anyone here has a similar experience or can relate to anything I wrote.