The Body, Illness & Death · 42 entries
Fears of the Body, Illness and Death
Death, dying, disease, contamination, ageing and the body itself. The distinctions matter more here than anywhere else on the site: fear of being dead, fear of the process of dying and fear of the dead are three different things that share one word in most writing about them, and separating them is most of what these entries do.
The group also holds the fears whose cost is measurable. People with hypochondriasis have a five-year shorter life expectancy, which is the one finding in that literature that changes how the condition should be read. Olfactory reference syndrome carries the worst outcome figures in the catalogue after anorexia nervosa. Thanatophobia, by contrast, has no DSM-5-TR or ICD-11 code anywhere in the account, which instead calls death anxiety a trans-diagnostic factor: a fear sitting underneath other conditions rather than standing as one of them.
In this category
All 42 fears of the body, illness and death
42 entries
- Fear of AgeingHe bent forward so he would not look tall, ate less to stunt his growth, and pitched his voice higher to sound younger. He was twelve when it started.
- Fear of Being Buried AliveIts own reference article concedes the fear was not entirely irrational before modern medicine. William Tebb collected 149 accounts of actual live burial in 1905.
- Fear of Belly ButtonsNo study, no figure, and an anatomy page that never mentions the fear. What that page does supply is the point: the navel is a scar, and everybody has one.
- Fear of Body DeformityVanity aims to exceed other people; this aims to reach them. Concealed for fear of being read as vanity, and carrying some of the worst suicide figures here.
- Fear of Body OdourSeventy-five per cent report bad breath and fifty-nine per cent cannot smell anything themselves. The outcome figures are among the worst in this catalogue.
- Fear of CancerFifty-nine per cent and 7.75 per cent are both correct: one study ranked cancer against other diseases, the other applied a threshold to a scale.
- Fear of ChildbirthIt is a common reason women request an elective caesarean, which makes it one of the very few fears that ends in a scheduled surgical procedure.
- Fear of COVID-19Coronaphobia is the fear of catching COVID-19. The largest population study of it found the unvaccinated less afraid than the vaccinated.
- Fear of Death and Dead BodiesNeolithic and ancient Greek burials come up with stones and broken amphora fragments laid over the corpse, placed there to keep it from rising.
- Fear of DiabetesDiabetophobia is a cross-reference with nothing behind it. Diabetes distress reached 48.6 percent in one elderly sample, and the fear attaches to complications.
- Fear of DiseaseTuberculosis in 1911, AIDS in 1991, mad cow in the 1990s. Nosophobia holds its shape and swaps its subject for whatever the coverage is carrying.
- Fear of DrowningThe fear of drowning predicts never learning to swim better than the cost of lessons does, which makes it a fear that raises the risk it names.
- Fear of DyingSixty years of named death anxiety scales and not one prevalence figure. What the record holds on thanatophobia, and the places where it holds nothing.
- Fear of EyesStaying away from eyes handles the moment and strengthens the fear, because every avoided encounter supplies a fresh reason for having avoided it.
- Fear of FecesA raccoon latrine study found the avoidance tracks susceptibility: tolerant species approach, vulnerable ones stay away. The human account on record is psychoanalytic.
- Fear of FeverFever phobia has been studied since the early 1980s. A meta-analysis found it has not declined in thirty years, which suggests it is cultural.
- Fear of Gaining WeightThe penalty this fear anticipates has been measured: worse marriage, education, career and income outcomes. What makes it a disorder is what people do about it.
- Fear of GenitalsCouples in some cultures avoided sex in lit rooms so the vulva stayed unseen, which makes the individual version a private survival of a public rule.
- Fear of GermsWilliam A. Hammond made the word in 1879 describing an OCD case of repeated hand-washing. It now names a specific phobia, which are treated differently.
- Fear of HairThe word dates from 1977 and has no case behind it. The documented hostility about hair is racial discrimination, and it has health data and legislation.
- Fear of Hair LossDermatology lists it among the manifestations of delusional disorder on the scalp, beside delusion of parasitosis, rather than among the phobias.
- Fear of HeadachesThe fear operates during the pain-free stretch, and what it produces is a painkiller swallowed early for a headache that has not started yet.
- Fear of Heart DiseasePeople with a fear disorder had 1.8 times the odds of later heart disease. The anxiety is about an outcome that anxiety is a risk factor for.
- Fear of KneesWiktionary has three published citations for the word and still refuses it an entry. The Cleveland Clinic describes two conditions under the one name.
- Fear of Losing Vital EssenceChills, nausea and flu-like symptoms running for weeks after a single orgasm, on the reasoning that what left the body was a reserve and not a fluid.
- Fear of MonstersOne word, two definitions in circulation. The encyclopedia records a fear that can end in a decision not to have children. The lists record the monster under the bed.
- Fear of Movement and Re-InjuryA fear of movement that lengthens the disability it comes from, and whose strongest predictor is self-rated health rather than how much pain there is.
- Fear of NudityChanging rooms, showers, gyms, hostels, hotel rooms, pools, beaches and medical facilities. Most sufferers route around all of it and cope.
- Fear of ParasitesBetween five and eight in ten people with this condition bring collected evidence in a small container. It is not a phobia, though parasitophobia is one of its names.
- Fear of PoisonOne logician would take food from nobody else. One dictator built a palace without ventilation. Both were afraid of the same thing.
- Fear of PolioPoliosophobia names the fear of catching polio. The fear that halted a vaccination campaign in three Nigerian states in 2003 was of the vaccine.
- Fear of ScabiesA 2026 study found people who feared scabies before catching it had roughly double the anxiety afterwards, while the itch itself predicted behaviour instead.
- Fear of Semen LossFiled as a culture-bound syndrome of South Asia, though European proto-psychiatry worried about the same anxiety under the name spermatorrhea.
- Fear of Skin LesionsDermatophobia names a fear of skin lesions, and also served for decades as a name for delusional parasitosis, where the lesions are self-inflicted.
- Fear of SleepThe Fear of Sleep Inventory resolved into four factors in women reporting sexual trauma and into nothing coherent in women reporting other traumas.
- Fear of Taking MedicationA drug given at too high a dose can create the fear outright, and starting low with slow increases prevents it from forming at all.
- Fear of the PenisA sparsely documented literal fear shares its spelling with a term of argument about masculinity, prudery and legal double standards.
- Fear of TuberculosisHospital staff who thought their work was infecting them were told they had a phobia. The risk was confirmed in the 1920s and conceded internationally in the 1950s.
- Fear of VaccinesAutism in English, multiple sclerosis in French, infertility in Nigeria. The fear crosses every border and the specific accusation never does.
- Fear of Venereal DiseaseOne word for the infection and for the act, which is the confusion the moral history of these diseases rests on. The name comes from an epithet of Aphrodite.
- Health AnxietyHypochondriasis carries a five-year shorter life expectancy, and the DSM-5 deleted the diagnosis in 2013, splitting its population three to one.
- MorgellonsNamed in 2002 from Sir Thomas Browne's description of children in Languedoc. A multi-year CDC investigation reported in 2012 that the fibres were cotton.
Keep going
The other categories
- Social & InterpersonalFears whose object is other people: being judged by them, being among them, or being without them.
- Abstract & ExistentialFailure, the future, change, infinity, being forgotten.
- Places & SituationsEnclosed spaces, crowds, bridges, lifts, tunnels and flight.
- Animals & CreaturesThe largest group in the catalogue and the oldest.
Common questions
Questions about fears of the body, illness and death
What is the fear of death called?
Thanatophobia for death itself, necrophobia for the dead and for dead bodies. Neither carries a DSM-5-TR or ICD-11 code. The account of death anxiety treats it as a trans-diagnostic factor, a fear that sits underneath other conditions rather than standing as a diagnosis of its own.
Is hypochondria still a diagnosis?
Not under that name. DSM-5 deleted hypochondriasis in 2013 and split its population between two replacements, roughly three to one. The entry on health anxiety follows where the population went, and records the finding that people with the condition have a five-year shorter life expectancy.
What is the difference between fear of germs and OCD?
Mysophobia names the fear; the compulsive washing that often accompanies it is the response rather than the fear, and that is what moves a case toward the obsessive-compulsive disorders. The mechanism is intrusive thought and checking rather than avoidance of a thing, which is the same reasoning that puts body dysmorphic disorder under the OCD heading rather than with the phobias.
Is fear of ageing a recognised condition?
Gerascophobia is documented rather than recognised: it appears in the literature and in dictionaries, and no diagnostic manual names it. The same holds for most of the body-image and appearance terms filed here, with body dysmorphic disorder the notable exception, which the manual names and files with the obsessive-compulsive disorders.