What are you afraid of?
Though she can’t really explain why, Miranda Hamblin passes out every time she’s faced with needles.
It’s an irrational fear, one that Hamblin, a sophomore majoring in English, said she discovered in ninth grade when doctors were trying to figure out why she was sick.
She had blood drawn three or four times before doctors concluded she had mononucleosis and her fear never lessened. In fact, even now,
Hamblin still avoids being stuck with needles.
Hamblin most likely has a phobia, or a persistent, unreasonable fear of a specific object, activity or situation that leads to a compelling desire to avoid it.
“Phobias get in the way of your daily life,” said Christine Pacetti, a psychology graduate student. “Most people with phobias will find other ways of accomplishing tasks without facing their fears, but sometimes it’s impossible to avoid them and they turn to treatment.”
Eleven percent of the population has specific phobias, according to “Essentials of Abnormal Psychology” by Durand and Barlows. Pacetti said the phobias are classified into four groups beginning with situational phobias, which are fears of things like public transportation or flying in an airplane.
Then there are natural or environmental phobias, which could be when a person is afraid of something like earthquakes, storms or heights.
Being afraid of dogs or spiders would be part of the animal phobia class, Pacetti said, and a fear of blood or needles, like what Hamblin is afraid of, is included in the blood, injury and injection phobia class.
For a person to have a phobia, it must interfere with the way a person lives. In Hamblin’s case, she won’t make an appointment to get a cavity filled because she is afraid of the needle the dental hygienist will use to numb her mouth.
She said the last time she had a needle in her arm was right before surgery when she was 15 and she cried so much the nurses had to give her a pink teddy bear to calm her down.
“My mom asked them if they could put me under before they put an IV in my arm, but they didn’t,” she said. “I cried like you do when someone died.”
She said when the IV was in her arm, she couldn’t look at it and hid it under a pillow and tried not to move. Now she said she avoids needles like the plague and can’t even look at someone’s arm who has just given blood without feeling a little queasy.
She doesn’t even try to imagine what will happen when she goes to the doctor for an epidural someday.
Although Hamblin doesn’t know where her fear comes from, Pacetti said often times the fear of blood and needles is hereditary and is one of the phobias and person can fear without having any experience with it.
“A lot of phobias come from a traumatic event like being bit by a dog, but with blood/injection, they don’t need to have a fearful event to be afraid,” Pacetti said.
Other reasons people have fears are because their parents are afraid. For example, if a child’s mother tenses up every time she sees a dog, the child may begin to do the same. Pacetti said many things that people have phobias of come because people have had reason to fear them, such as spiders, snakes and violent storms.
Most people won’t seek treatment for a phobia, though, they will just learn to live their lives around it, Pacetti said. If a person does seek counseling for a phobia, it is most likely because he has a social phobia and constantly worries about people criticizing him.
“These situations are a lot more common,” Pacetti said. “They have unrealistic thoughts about when people are judging them. These people are usually really shy and it’s really painful for them.”
To help people with social phobia, counselors will put the person in environments where they have to interact with others and for some, this may be very frightening.
“I’ve worked with people with social phobias and it’s really tough,” Pacetti said. “A lot of times they think it is easier to keep the fear rather than put themselves into social situations.”
For other phobias, Pacetti said they are treated in a few different ways. Flooding requires the person to face a phobia all at once, which may mean being locked in a room full of spiders if they have arachnophobia. Or they may be taken somewhere extremely high if the person is afraid of heights.
The most important part of this treatment is making sure the person can’t leave, Pacetti said. He must sit there until anxiety goes down.
“This method works a lot faster than some of the other methods,” Pacetti said, “but it’s a lot more painful.”
Chris Kidd, an undeclared freshman, said he was forced to face his fear of needles and isn’t afraid of them anymore. Although he never sought phobia treatment, Kidd was stuck at least 40 times by needles when he was in high school because of a rare bacterial infection he developed.
“I was always afraid of blood and needles growing up and so is my mom and sister,” he said. “But they’re not really that bad anymore. The necessity of getting treated for my illness took precedence over my fear.”
Psychologists will also treat patients by slowly leading up to the fear. For example, Pacetti said, a person afraid of dogs may be shown a picture of a dog and then a friendly puppy on a leash. Then he might have to pet the dog and eventually be in the same room as the dog without a leash.
No matter the phobia though, Pacetti said there is help if a person needs it.
“Somebody on campus can go to the Counseling Center or they could get an appointment at a psychology community clinic,” she said.
Or, those who have phobias could always take Hamblin’s advice and avoid the fear at all costs.
“I can’t even help my own fear, so how am I supposed to help others?” she said. “They can just keep the phobia. There’s nothing wrong with being afraid.”
-mnewbold@cc.usu.edu