Fear of Standing
Stasiphobia
The tell is that nobody hits the floor. In the form of astasia-abasia seen in conversion disorder, the gait is bizarre and suggests no particular organic lesion, and what the patient does is sway wildly and very nearly fall, recovering at the last moment. A neurological lesion does not negotiate like that.
Stasiphobia, also recorded as stasibasiphobia, is the name given to fear of standing, and the reference literature carries the word and a cross-reference and nothing else. What has a literature is the inability rather than the fear, and the nearest fear with one of its own is kinesiophobia.
What astasia and abasia each mean
Astasia-abasia names an inability to stand or to walk in a normal manner, and the halves mean different things. Astasia is the inability to stand upright unassisted. Abasia is a lack of motor coordination in walking, and taken literally it says that the base of gait, meaning the lateral distance between the two feet, is inconstant or cannot be measured at all.
When it is organic
Acquired total inability to stand and walk turns up in real neurological disease:
- stroke
- Parkinson's disease
- damage to the cerebellum
- Guillain-Barré syndrome
- normal pressure hydrocephalus Normal pressure hydrocephalus shows the trajectory clearly when left untreated: the gait shortens, shuffling and falls become frequent, and eventually standing, sitting and even rolling over in bed become impossible. That advanced state has its own name, hydrocephalic astasia-abasia.
Which is the point. The same two words describe an end-stage neurological picture and a presentation in which the body will not do something it is capable of doing, and the difference shows up in whether the near-fall becomes a fall.
Why Wikipedia redirects the word
Searching stasiphobia on Wikipedia does not produce an article about a phobia. It produces a redirect to astasia-abasia, which is the neurological description of an inability to stand or to walk normally.
That is the entry in one gesture. Astasia is the inability to stand upright unassisted, and abasia is a lack of motor coordination in walking, with the base of gait, meaning the lateral distance between the feet, inconstant or unmeasurable. Both are conditions of the body. The fear of standing has no article, no case series and no measurement, and the encyclopedia sends anybody looking for it to the physical version instead.
Which citations the word has
Wiktionary carries stasiphobia with two quotations and they are a hundred years apart. The International Medical Digest in 1922 lists it alongside basiphobia and Agoraphobia as psychic elements characteristic of pseudotabetics, which is a nineteenth-century diagnostic category for patients presenting like tabes dorsalis without the disease.
The second is from a 2019 popular book on phobias, and it is a joke: somebody with both stasiphobia and kathisophobia, the fear of sitting, would have no option but to stay in bed all day.
A century between a medical digest and a joke book is the whole documented life of the word. What sits between them is the conversion-disorder literature, which describes the presentation carefully and calls it something else.
Told apart
Often confused with Fear of Standing
- Fear of FallingBoth concern staying upright, and the near-fall is the central event in each. Basophobia is a fear of the fall itself; the clinical picture here is a body that will not stand rather than one afraid to.
- Fear of Movement and Re-InjuryKinesiophobia produces avoidance of movement on the expectation of harm, which can look identical from outside to a refusal to stand.
Common questions
Questions about Stasiphobia
- What distinguishes the conversion-disorder form?
- The recovery. The patient sways wildly and comes within an inch of falling and then does not fall, catching themselves at the last moment, and the gait suggests no specific organic lesion. A near-fall that is always a near-fall is the tell, because a person whose balance has actually failed goes down.
- What do astasia and abasia mean separately?
- Astasia is the inability to stand upright unassisted. Abasia is a lack of motor coordination in walking, with the base of gait inconstant or unmeasurable.
- Which diseases produce the physical inability?
- Stroke, Parkinson's disease, damage to the cerebellum, Guillain-Barré syndrome and normal pressure hydrocephalus among many others. In untreated hydrocephalus the gait shortens, shuffling and falls become frequent, and eventually standing, sitting and even rolling over in bed become impossible, a state called hydrocephalic astasia-abasia.
- How much is documented about the phobia itself?
- A definition and a cross-reference. The name exists; what carries a literature is the inability rather than the fear of the act, and Wikipedia redirects the word to the neurological condition.
- Is there a Wikipedia article on the fear?
- No. Searching stasiphobia produces a redirect to astasia-abasia, the neurological description of an inability to stand or walk normally. The encyclopedia sends anybody looking for the fear to the physical version of the problem, which is a fair summary of where the evidence sits.
- Where does the word actually appear?
- Twice, a century apart. The International Medical Digest listed it in 1922 beside basiphobia and agoraphobia as psychic elements characteristic of pseudotabetics. A popular book on phobias used it in 2019 to make a joke about somebody who also feared sitting and would therefore have to stay in bed.
Added 2026-08-23 · Revised 2026-08-26
Nearby in the catalogue
Related entries
- Fear of FallingThe fear of falling is measurable in infants who have never fallen, and a Dunedin cohort found it least common in the people who had been hurt.
- 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 HeightsWikipedia gives 2 to 5 per cent and names no survey. What a Dunedin birth cohort found about childhood falls, and why vertigo is the wrong word for it.
- A Surgeon's Fear of OperatingA fear that your own movements will disastrously affect the world around you. For a surgeon that is not a metaphor, which is why the word attached to them.
- AgoraphobiaWestphal coined it in 1871 from agora, the marketplace. The situations it covers include queues, cinemas and being at home alone. What unites them is escape.
- ClaustrophobiaRachman and Taylor showed in 1993 that two beliefs drive this fear, and neither is about how small the room is. What the record holds, including the miners.