BBC Three explores the frightening and debilitating world of extreme phobias in the new, six-part series The Panic Room.

Imagine your worst fear is spiders. Now imagine being in a room full of them, they’re crawling all over you and you’re unable to escape. Throughout the series, people living with a range of phobias, from spiders to buttons, cockroaches to cats, confront their worst fears in The Panic Room.

Devised by two leading psychologists, The Panic Room is the ultimate exposure therapy – a self-contained and enclosed space, which uses 360-degree projected images, plus various techniques from cognitive behavioural therapy to hypnotism, to guide the phobics through their treatment.

Danni Hawkins, 23, a mother of two from Southampton, has a phobia which is so severe she can’t even say the “F” word – frogs. Danni thinks her phobia began when, aged eight, she pushed a friend into a pond and “hundreds” of frogs jumped out. She’d love a house with a garden for her children, but lives high up in a flat to avoid frogs and toads.

Danni spent three days being treated by Dr Lucy Atcheson using cognitive behavioural therapy and graded exposure. This took the form of images in Panic Room one, frog spawn tadpoles and a small frog in Panic Room two and, finally, Danni was asked to hold a huge cane toad in Panic Room three. Will she ever manage to overcome her fears and be able to take her children to the local park?

Sharon Newton, a foster carer from Newcastle, is terrified of cats. She’s been frightened of them for as long as she can remember and desperately wants to get her life back. Psychologist Felix Economakis used clinical hypnosis to treat Sharon and get her to confront her worst fears in the Panic Room. Could this experience finally change her life?

Tuesday 10 April
9.00-10.00pm BBC THREE