{"id":892959,"date":"2026-09-12T11:44:39","date_gmt":"2026-09-12T11:44:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/892959\/"},"modified":"2026-09-12T11:44:39","modified_gmt":"2026-09-12T11:44:39","slug":"marc-wilson-blood-phobia-triggers-different-physical-responses-to-reactions-from-other-phobias","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/892959\/","title":{"rendered":"Marc Wilson: Blood phobia triggers different physical responses to reactions from other phobias"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"MarcMarc Wilson<\/a><\/p>\n

Psychology writer\u00b7New Zealand Listener\u00b7<\/p>\n

9 Sep, 2026 06:08 PM4 mins to read<\/p>\n

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Blood phobias are part of why the New Zealand Blood Service needs you. Good on you if you\u2019re part of the 4% who can, and do, donate. Photo \/ Getty Images<\/p>\n

The boy has now finished his cybersecurity engineering degree, so he\u2019s finally pulled the curtain on his weekend job at a Wellington technology, electronics and home appliance store.<\/p>\n

\n His mum visited him on his last day, past a vaguely familiar man in a beanie. \u201cMum, that\u2019s Homelander!\u201d the boy
\n pointed out, and sure enough, it was an incognito Anthony Starr.\n <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not up that far; I\u2019m 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\u2019s signature is hemokinesis: she can manipulate blood.<\/p>\n

If that sounds icky to you, you\u2019re not alone. There\u2019s at least one Reddit thread devoted to people talking about the challenges of watching Gen V with a blood phobia.<\/p>\n

Haemophobia, the fancy term for this phobia, falls under the umbrella of blood-injection-injury phobia, or BII. As this suggests, people who don\u2019t like blood usually aren\u2019t wild about needles. <\/p>\n

Given that blood often squirts because of an injury, these folk aren\u2019t happy with the idea or reality of paper cuts or more serious injuries.<\/p>\n

Blood phobia is fascinating because our physical response is quite different from our response to most other phobia targets. If you\u2019re petrified of spiders, you\u2019ll experience a standard fight-or-flight response with elevated heart rate and such until the spider goes away. The sight of blood triggers what\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The largest study I can find on the prevalence of haemophobia comes from the World Health Organisation\u2019s 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 \u201cspecific phobia\u201d. 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.<\/p>\n

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%). <\/p>\n

The umbrella \u201cblood-injection-injury\u201d comes in second with 3% but is more common in the US (6%), Northern Ireland (4.8%) and New Zealand (4.7%). Yay us! <\/p>\n

Now, that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s an oversimplification, but there are three main reasons why people don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n

So, blood phobias will make it hard to enjoy Gen V, but it\u2019s also part of why the New Zealand Blood Service needs you. Good on you if you\u2019re part of the 4% who can, and do, donate. <\/p>\n

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Copy LinkEmailFacebookTwitter\/XLinkedInReddit<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Marc Wilson Psychology writer\u00b7New Zealand Listener\u00b7 9 Sep, 2026 06:08 PM4 mins to read \u200c Subscribe to listenAccess…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":892960,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[236230,2768,49,48,1636,283,8488,34300,45063,6811,20794,138672,3011,84,9913,2151,5503,393,394,6797,309327,118682,33696,309329,45575,309328,26131,61,696,142595,20578,2070,8447],"class_list":["post-892959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mental-health","tag-appliance","tag-blood","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-curtain","tag-cybersecurity","tag-degree","tag-different","tag-electronics","tag-engineering","tag-finally","tag-finished","tag-from","tag-health","tag-hes","tag-home","tag-marc","tag-mental-health","tag-mentalhealth","tag-other","tag-phobia","tag-phobias","tag-physical","tag-pulled","tag-reactions","tag-responses","tag-store","tag-technology","tag-to","tag-triggers","tag-weekend","tag-wellington","tag-wilson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=892959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892959\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/892960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=892959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=892959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=892959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}