The habit of drinking one's own blood usually begins during childhood, most commonly as a result of a traumatic event that results in a person linking pleasure with violence and more specifically blood. It develops by first scraping or cutting one's own skin to extract and ingest blood, later resulting in learning where and how to cut and open major
veins and
arteries for larger amounts of blood. Sometimes, they will also store their own blood for later consumption or just because they like to look at it. Eventually, auto-vampirism develops into
clinical vampirism. According to clinical psychologist Noll, this process includes three stages: autovampirism, zoophagia (the progressive
paraphilic stage that involves eating of animals or drinking of animals' blood), and clinical or true vampirism. This was illustrated in the case of a 35- year old woman with schizophrenia who experienced severe depersonalization and auditory hallucinations that commanded her to drink her own blood. Auto-vampirism, for her, was part of a delusion about a purification process. Auto-vampirism can cause anemia, abdominal pain, nausea, and more. It is difficult to determine all the consequences of auto-vampirism due to the difficulty of finding people who drink their own blood. It is noted that the pathologies that are associated with vampirism are exceedingly rare. == See also ==