Recent years have seen a dramatic rise in the number of people suffering with health anxiety. Annalisa Barbieri reveals what triggered – and eventually settled – her ‘late-onset hypochondria’
in 2016, which called it a “silent, disabling epidemic” that was reaching “epidemic proportions”. In a study in 2006 carried out in certain north Nottinghamshire specialist clinics , 12% had excessive health anxiety. Four years later, this had risen to 20% in the same clinics. Tyrer attributed this rise to “cyberchondria” and our addiction to Googling.
Tyrer further explained to me that some people, like me, are avoidant and body-swerve medical reassurance at all costs and it’s of course “impossible to know how many of these there are”. And then there are those who need almost constant reassurance from doctors, who are, however, not trained in mental health and so provide clinical test after test with drains on resources without providing a long-term solution. It doesn’t pull the problem out at the roots.
Lemma explained that talking to someone – the doctor, a therapist or a trusted friend – can help because you can start to translate those symptoms into words, which can then start to dissolve the worry. For me it was like starting to let the light into those dark corners, but in the beginning it was so hard to talk about what was going on because I had this irrational fear that as long as I didn’t say it, nothing bad would happen.
It’s now been six years that I’ve been free of this and that long since I’ve been able to write about it. I’m still vigilant and keep myself in check. While writing this I looked up the symptoms of Paget’s disease and could immediately feel myself turning the corner into health-anxiety street again. So I stopped reading.
Although the monster in me now largely sleeps, it can reawaken when I’m anxious and need to feel in control. And one thing I’ve learned through all this is that, perversely, worrying that you’re dying is a weird way of trying to feel in control.
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