Murdoch Mysteries (TV Series) Murdochophobia (2013) User Reviews

Are your worst fears confirmed?

[miles-33108 · 9/10 · 16 November 2016]

Sarah Bosen a young woman being treated for arachnophobia at the Asylum by Dr Ogden is found dead on the ground outside her top floor window. She died of a broken neck. Dr Ogden has a number of patients, all suffering from various phobias. Dr Ogden's method of treatment is desensitisation, the gradual exposure of the patient to the thing they are afraid of, and she believes that all her patients had been showing progress in conquering their fears, though others on the Asylum staff, such as Dr Linden, are not so convinced, and eventually he formally complains to the Asylum director about Dr Ogden.

Later, Murdoch finds a dead spider in the sheets on Mrs Bosen's bed. Harry Phelps, a man with hippophobia, takes a stroll in the Asylum grounds, but soon he finds himself surrounded by galloping horses. Afterwards, he accuses Dr Ogden of setting the horse on him. During their conversation, Phelps tells Dr Ogden that he saw Mrs Bosen kissing Mrs Pauline Kerr, a patient suffering with pteronophobia, and was so disgusted by this unnatural act that he contacted both their husbands to alert them. Speaking to Mr Bosen afterwards, it turns out that both he and his wife were homosexual, and theirs was a marriage of convenience. Mr, Kerr, on the other hand, is outraged by the news in the letter he received from Phelps, and annoyed that Dr Ogden's therapy has not cured his wife's phobia; he comes to the Asylum to collect his wife. While he is still talking to Dr Ogden, there is a scream, and both run to Mrs Kerr's room, to find it full of feathers, with her cowering in the corner. Clearly, someone is upsetting the patients based on their fears, but who, and why? Apart from the fact that Dr Ogden is treating them all, what other connection do they have with each other?

The suspects each have something to discount them, so how will Murdoch get to the bottom of it?

This is a clever mystery story, with several side plots. For example, is Dr Grace drawing Constable Crabtree further into her Web, or will the fate of Webster be crucial?

Enjoy this episode for what it is, not as some kind of polemic for or against any particular aspect of human behaviour.

Presents phobias well but not perfectly

[katherinemch · 5/10 · 19 August 2021]

As someone who suffered for decades with a severe phobia I had mixed feelings about this episode. It was a delight to see them harp on the fact that phobias are by definition irrational; the sufferers don't actually think their trigger item poses a threat. It's so tiresome irl how people trot out the same ignorant foolishness like "Y'know, no local snakes are venomous!" or "Planes are actually safer than cars!" as if the person's only phobic because they're too dense to be aware of well known facts. So thank you, MM, for spreading awareness of the fact that a PHOBIA is by definition irrational (if it was rational it'd just be called a fear, of course) and telling the person it's irrational serves no purpose.

I was also delighted that they decided to have Murdoch's phobia caused by him finding his mother dead! Another common incorrect assumption is that phobias are caused by a traumatic event linked to the trigger item. That may sometimes be the case but I would argue that that makes it PTSD rather than a phobia. At any rate myself and all the other phobics I have met had no such pattern. I believe that in most cases the trigger is "chosen" by the subconscious due to the amount of repressed stress that needs to be vented. For example, a phobia of zebras will result in far fewer panic attacks per year than a phobia of flies. If you have a lot of stress to release you'll have a trigger item that's common, like flies. If you just need to blow off steam once every couple years then zebras it is. Yes phobias are caused by unresolved stress, but there need not be any tie between the stress and the trigger, though in fiction it's always the PTSD scenario, which is very tiresome both for being wrong and for being overused. Then... much to my disappointment they decided to be cliched after all and had him say his mother's corpse was covered in butterflies. Sigh.

I liked that the arachnophobe flung herself through a window to her doom due to a phobic attack. It really is that bad! Unbearably extreme fear even though you know you're physically safe. And they don't show the phobics being fragile flakes 24/7 either- they accurately capture the way a person can be normal outside of their attacks, or as with Murdoch and the violinist, even an overachiever (that can be why the stress needs an unnatural vent- when people are unusually self-controlled they may repress their feelings and those feelings need to come out eventually). That part felt very realistic. As did Dr Ogden mocking Murdoch with "Ha ha and here I though you were smart" sort of stuff. It really is to this day almost impossible to find a shrink who has the wisdom to handle a phobic respectfully and with understanding. And friends and lovers are more often cruel than sympathetic too. So her being so obnoxious about it, while unpleasant to see, is quite realistic.

My biggest complaint is with yet another fiction cliche they used, which spreads harmful misinformation. Dr Ogden's desensitisation therapy. Now, perhaps they intentionally had her doing a poor job of it as an in-joke for the many fans who hate her character, or due to a writer hating shrinks, but I think it's most likely that they just didn't bother asking any actual cured phobics to describe the experience and foolishly presented their mistaken understanding of what Wikipedia told them desensitisation is.

The show has Ogden's patients tolerating uncomfortable triggering encounters like the arachnophobe letting a spider walk on her arm while she moans and cringes and holds out for as long as she can. Rubbish! A stressful exposure only worsens the phobia by adding extra stress to the scenario. A constructive exposure is done with such gentle boundary-pushing that there IS PRACTICALLY NO STRESS. That arachnophobe would have been at ease with the spider's presence before she ever tried touching it. She'd have stuck to watching Ogden handle it, or holding its cage in her lap without direct contact, if she was still anxious about touching it. Shoving her arm in the cage while she was still very scared to do so would be counterproductive.

This is extremely important because I wasted over 20y of my life in misery, unwilling to try exposure therapy because I had seen it portrayed as a terrifying ordeal, like in this episode, in every single story that portrays it. Worse, some shows have the phobic enduring a worst-case scenario and somehow magically coming out cured rather than a nervous wreck. Like a person with a fear of water will have to jump into the sea to save their dog who fell off a pier, and ta-da, they realise they did ok and are "victorious" over their phobia. In reality such a person would likely let the dog drown, being literally unable to jump in, and would later have worse panics than ever due to the trauma, grief and guilt of the event adding to their stress load.

Thanks to inaccurate portrayals of desensitization/exposure cures, phobics like me are too scared to try the one thing that can give them their lives back. And their loved ones may traumatise them by engineering a phobia-triggering event, under the belief that it will be therapeutic. Irresponsible writing like in this episode ruins lives! I am so tired of it! It was especially disappointing because this show actually did a very good job of portraying phobias, except for the cliches mentioned. I can only imagine there are multiple writers involved, with at least one of them being a phobic or at least well aware of phobias, but at least one other writer being a hack (perhaps the reason most episodes involve plentiful "shark jumping") who insisted on shoving the standard cliches in there "because that's how it's done".

Anyway, if anyone reading this has a phobia or a loved one with a phobia, please do consider desensitisation! I have never met a useful shrink though I tried and tried. Instead, in my final successful effort I was treated by an expert in the trigger item (in the case of my arachnophobia, an entomologist, but the feather phobic in this episode could consult a fly-tier, or hatmaker or other person obsessed with feathers, the stagefright one might talk with a street performer or someone else extremely comfortable with attention, etc. The thing is you want someone whose love for your trigger will bring a positive energy to the proceedings. I also found it beneficial that the expert was constantly rattling off fun facts on the subject, which busied my mind so there wasn't much bandwidth left for freaking out. But kindness is as important as enthusiasm. The top priority is that you need to trust the person fully. The phobic needs to feel totally safe and relaxed, and be in control of how far they push themselves each session. If they have to worry that their guide won't stop when they say "stop!", they'll be on edge the entire time and it only works if you can be calm the whole time. The patient should never, ever, ever be uncomfortable, or the sessions will not be useful and may even make the phobia stronger. It really is astounding how quickly gentle, unpressured sessions are effective! I went from considering suicide to escape the panic attacks, to being fully fine, in six weekly sessions of an hour each. It's so easy and fast! I just wish I had not wasted so many years being scared to try it. For that I blame writers like those on this episode.

Fears people have and how a murderer can use them

[ctyankee1 · 25 January 2015]

People in this hospital are treated for fears by Dr Ogden. Sarah a patient dies in this hospital after crashing through a window. She is afraid spiders. She and her husband are both homosexuals, it is a marriage of convenience. When, the husband is questioned he says "I loved her in my own way" .

Murdoch tells his boss the dead woman's husband is a homosexual and his boss said maybe he lied. Murdoch says "I doubt he would lie to a police officer." Yeah right, Murdoch is is his own dream world. They also show the finger nails of a dead woman in a scene being examined by Dr Gale, it is disgusting even though it is only a video.

A patient afraid of horses supposedly a religious man saw two women in a to close for comfort relationship in the room and it made him angry. It was said because of his religion that made him angry he could be a suspect. People that had these known fears were being attacked by someone either in the hospital or out.

A woman afraid of feathers who might be released by Dr Ogden says Pauline might me forced into sex by her husband. I guess the hospital had conjugal visits but the wife refused. Dr Ogden is more of a feminist which blames everything on males. It seems the people that have morals are made out to be nuts, murders or hateful vindictive religious people.

Parts of the episode are funny with Officer Crabtree. He has a spider he named Webster. Dr Gale experiments on how long it takes spiders to die. Officer Crabtree does not like Webster being experimented on and in the end Webster is still alive well for a little bit.

I did not see the earlier seasons of Murdoch but I am starting to see they are biased against normal behavior. The mysteries are good, the dialog is insulting to people like me. Murdoch can make the "Signs of the Cross" all he wants on his chest but the writers of the story make his convictions meaningless. I can see if Murdoch is Father Brown the "Sign of the Cross" has meaning, I am not a Catholic but to me there is no sincerity is this gesture. It is like an a common expression "Oh my god". This "Sign is all for show.