Hypochondriasis

It’s found in the grandmother who always complains of feeling sick, or in the young office worker who throws up in the bathroom every day and insists she must have cancer. Hypochondriasis, the mental illness in which one insists they are sick when there is no physical verification that they are ill, is a surprisingly prevalent illness, occurring in as much as one percent of the population, primarily females.

The primary symptom of hypochondriasis is that the patient insists he or she is sick, despite evidence to the contrary. They will seek sympathy from loved ones and co-workers, visit multiple doctors and specialists, and even go to emergency rooms in search of someone who will treat their illness. The biggest danger in hypochondrism is that the persons consulted with will stop taking any complaint of illness seriously, and miss actual real illnesses when they happen.

That does not mean that the pain and symptoms a hypochondriac feels are not real. On the contrary, to the patient they are very real indeed. Pain is more under the control of the unconscious mind than most of us realize. A person with hypochondrism may not only present with complaints of pain and illness, but also have real skin eruptions, hair loss, and other dermatologically-related symptoms.

In both men and women, hypochondriasis often presents when the patient is in his or her forties or fifties. It is related to phobias in that the patient so dreads being sick they convince themselves that they are sick. And it is closely related to clinical depression as well; patients with hypochondriasis very often are depressed. It may occur in conjunction with other mental illnesses such as schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder, or it may be a standalone illness. Hypochondriacs may complain more of their illness at times like menstruation, and the illnesses they complain of may seem like the disease du jour, especially the rare ones that have been highly touted in the media recently. Like most neurotics, hypochondriacs are highly suggestible, and if you talk about, say, brain tumors with them one day, the next day they may wake up with complaints of a brain tumor.

The treatment of hypochondriasis is deceptively simple: don’t treat the symptoms complained of, but rather use talk therapy to find out what the underlying problems are. The danger is that hypochondriasis often presents in conjunction with a real physical illness, and the physical symptoms the patient is having may mask the real physical symptoms of the organic disease. For instance, a person with a brain tumor that is causing hypochondriasis may complain of severe abdominal pain, but not of headache or seizure. Those who are diagnosed with hypochondrism should be taken seriously and given a thorough physical examination, just in case.

Copyright 2008 Mental Disorder Network
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