Marc Wilson: Blood phobia triggers different physical responses to reactions from other phobias

Marc Wilson

Psychology writer·New Zealand Listener·

9 Sep, 2026 06:08 PM4 mins to read

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Blood phobias are part of why the New Zealand Blood Service needs you. Good on you if you’re part of the 4% who can, and do, donate. Photo / Getty Images

The boy has now finished his cybersecurity engineering degree, so he’s finally pulled the curtain on his weekend job at a Wellington technology, electronics and home appliance store.

His mum visited him on his last day, past a vaguely familiar man in a beanie. “Mum, that’s Homelander!” the boy
pointed out, and sure enough, it was an incognito Anthony Starr.

As well as playing iconic roles in local classic Outrageous Fortune, Starr has marked out a career playing a range of anti-heroes. The Boys, in which Starr plays a psychopathic Superman, has just completed its final season.

I’m not up that far; I’m still making my way through season 2 of the crossover spinoff series Gen V, which centres around Marie Moreau, a student at the Godolkin University for superpowered individuals. Moreau’s signature is hemokinesis: she can manipulate blood.

If that sounds icky to you, you’re not alone. There’s at least one Reddit thread devoted to people talking about the challenges of watching Gen V with a blood phobia.

Haemophobia, the fancy term for this phobia, falls under the umbrella of blood-injection-injury phobia, or BII. As this suggests, people who don’t like blood usually aren’t wild about needles.

Given that blood often squirts because of an injury, these folk aren’t happy with the idea or reality of paper cuts or more serious injuries.

Blood phobia is fascinating because our physical response is quite different from our response to most other phobia targets. If you’re petrified of spiders, you’ll experience a standard fight-or-flight response with elevated heart rate and such until the spider goes away. The sight of blood triggers what’s called a biphasic response, with an initial spike in heart rate and blood pressure followed by a vagus nerve overreaction. Your blood pressure drops off a cliff, making you feel light-headed, and can cause fainting.

The largest study I can find on the prevalence of haemophobia comes from the World Health Organisation’s World Mental Health Surveys. These are ongoing, but between 2001 and 2011, more than 120,000 people from 22 countries were assessed for the characteristics of “specific phobia”. The researchers found 7.4% of participants met the criteria for experiencing a specific phobia at some point in their lives and 5.5% could expect one within a 12-month timeframe. Women were slightly more likely to meet diagnostic criteria than men, and the prevalence increased in high-income countries.

The most common specific phobias relate to animals (think spiders and snakes, at 3.8% lifetime prevalence), high places (2.8%), water and weather (2.3%) and closed spaces (2.2%).

The umbrella “blood-injection-injury” comes in second with 3% but is more common in the US (6%), Northern Ireland (4.8%) and New Zealand (4.7%). Yay us!

Now, that’s the frequency of clinical-level symptoms. Two in three of us report some level of discomfort with needles, and one in five report sub-clinical, but still significant, fear over blood or needles.

Obviously, this affects how individuals move through the world. People with chronic illnesses are more likely to report BII, for instance. But it also affects behaviours that benefit society, such as blood donation. It’s an oversimplification, but there are three main reasons why people don’t donate blood. One has nothing to do with individual willingness: not everyone is eligible to donate, usually based on their travel or medical history. It can also be logistically difficult for many people who are open to donating blood.

You’ll have guessed that the third reason is to do with common fears like BII phobias, but also concern over infection, and worry about feeling dizzy or losing too much blood.

So, blood phobias will make it hard to enjoy Gen V, but it’s also part of why the New Zealand Blood Service needs you. Good on you if you’re part of the 4% who can, and do, donate.

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