User blog comment:Meldin263/Is LTS Affecting Me?/@comment-4295646-20120917012409

Now before you go seeing shrinks and buying Percocet by the bucketful, here's my professional diagnosis: you just caught a case of the common horrorbug, version Obsessive. In my day - one of them, anyway - an awful lot of sufferers got infected from short-term exposure to Clive Barker novels. But it goes back farther, of course. Before that it was King (who remains the best-known active super-spreader to the present day) and Ellison, and before him the prescient urban fantasies of Bradbury and Huxley, and before them the great sage and eminent bigot H.P. Lovecraft, back further still to Poe. . . And it keeps going back until the point where no one needed the ol' horrorbug to be afraid. Probably because there were actual diseases killing them off daily.

The point is that what you are experiencing is old as the hills. "Lavender Town Syndrome" is caused when a video game about children playing with pets makes someone write a story, which in turn causes a reader to make up bullshit psychological disorders for him/herself in order to masquerade as someone with a problem. It is the product of its era. Present symptoms previously linked with the common horrorbug often go self-diagnosed, and as such end up poorly rebranded as a serious issue.

There is no known cure found to work without statistically significant error; fortunately, most victims go into remission when left to their own devices. Night-lights sometimes help. So does re-reading the story out loud in the daytime, or with friends. Try making it into a social event; invite others to share their own creepy stories for overly dramatic reading. Many families have home remedies for dealing with irrational fears.

There are places you can look for help - but remember, in the end, effective treatment of fear is invariably self-administered.