Don't dwell on illness. Encourage them to verbalize fears about their health, but don't join in. Be supportive, but don't show too much concern and try to stay neutral in your answers. Express that you understand their struggle, without encouraging their obsessive thoughts.
“Encourage [the suffering person] to verbalize fears about their health, but don't join in. Be supportive, but don't show too much concern and try to stay neutral in your answers. Express that you understand their struggle, without encouraging their obsessive thoughts,” say experts.
Being preoccupied with having or getting a serious disease or health condition. Worrying that minor symptoms or body sensations mean you have a serious illness. Being easily alarmed about your health status. Finding little or no reassurance from doctor visits or negative test results.
Some of the causes include: Disturbance in perception such that normal sensations are magnified. Having learned apparent benefits of being sick, such as receiving attention. Hypochondriasis may occur in an individual who had a childhood illness or had a sibling with a childhood illness.
Illness anxiety disorder is a chronic mental illness previously known as hypochondria. People with this disorder have a persistent fear that they have a serious or life-threatening illness despite few or no symptoms. Medications and cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) can help.
Bipolar disorder, especially BD II, is associated with greater hypochondriac concerns, which relates to personality disorder functioning styles and concurrent affective states.
Hypochondria is a real and entirely treatable disorder. If you recognize any of the symptoms listed above, help is available to you. Consider speaking with a therapist to help work through these medically-based anxieties.
“Many of the symptoms that hypochondriacs feel are often physical sensations caused by anxiety or depression that can go along with hypochondria. The constant worrying can release harmful stress hormones and do real physical damage.”
Patients with hypochondriasis often are not aware that depression and anxiety produce their own physical symptoms, and mistake these symptoms for manifestations of another mental or physical disorder or disease.
And it might be added that hypochondriacs can also “stress over their stress”—a most vicious cycle that, eventually, might even be fatal—as in, well, “stressing yourself to death.” (Talk about “wear and tear” on your system!)
They tend to fear severe illnesses like cancer or HIV, rather than more common health ailments like strep throat or a cold. It's also common for an affected person to regularly scan their body for any feelings or sensations that could be worrisome.
Hypochondria is itself a form of mild psychosis. The hypochondriac has a deep and ungrounded worry about having or developing a serious mental illness. Paranoia and suspiciousness are classical traits of psychosis but they can be subtle.
This condition used to be called hypochondria. Now it is called somatic symptom disorder. The symptoms associated with somatic symptom disorder are not under the person's voluntary control, and they can cause great distress and can interfere with a person's life.
Common Compulsions in Health Anxiety OCD
Repeated visits to multiple doctors. Requests for unnecessary (and/or repeated) tests. Excessively checking your own body to look for new symptoms or changes in symptoms. Reassurance seeking from multiple sources (professional and non-professional)
The syndrome of monosymptomatic hypochondriacal psychosis (MHP) is a form of DSM-IV delusional disorder, somatic subtype, characterized by the delusional belief that one is afflicted with a medical disorder of defect. Such patients often present to dermatologists with delusions of parasitosis.
Share on Pinterest The most common symptom of hypochondria is excessive worrying about health. A study published in JAMA defines somatic symptom disorder as “a persistent fear or belief that one has a serious, undiagnosed medical illness.” The authors note that it affects up to 5 percent of medical outpatients.
Excessive fear of death appears to be an important characteristic of hypochondriasis (Starcevic, 2001). Patients with this disorder often report distressing thoughts and images of death and dying. In addition, fear of death has been linked to hypochondriasis both psychodynamically and philosophically.
When physical symptoms are caused or made worse by your mental state, it's called psychosomatic. Many people believe that psychosomatic symptoms aren't real — but they are, in fact, very real symptoms that have a psychological cause, Jones says.
obsessively look at health information on the internet or in the media. avoid anything to do with serious illness, such as medical TV programmes. act as if you were ill (for example, avoiding physical activities)