is this down to health anxiety?

[Sam Winter]

i'm always checking things like i check my eyes before bed because i'm scared of getting an eyelash in them, i always ask people if something has changed like today i think my feet are swollen and the other day i thought my hands were,
and i also seem very paranoid,
someone nice was talking to me today and asked if i wanted to meet up sometime and i instantly thought it was all an act and he's gonna kill me or something, it ain't easy to deal with especially as i can't make friends as i think everyones gonna judge me or they're out to hurt me :lac:x

[MyNameIsTerry]

HA isn't really a condition, it's a term people use that actually covers GAD, OCD and the whole Somatoform Disorders group. Each of these mean different things in terms of how the HA can appear and it's behaviours.

From a GAD perspective it tends to be more about worrying about others or yourself where some of the more obsessive compulsive cycles are not there.

For OCD it is more about the possibility of "getting" something e.g.HIV/AIDS, poisoning issues, contamination, getting illness, etc.

Somatoform is perhaps more how people think of HA. The group has several disorders in it but two of them are what used to be considered the psychosomatic disorder and the hypochondria disorder. So, people who believe they have cancer, for instance, fall into the latter and the former is more about resolving the symptoms themselves without naming diseases.

To complicate things, this is an international forum but there are two major diagnostic manuals used, the US DSM (currently DSM-V) and the WHO ICD (currently ICD-10). The UK uses the WHO manual. The US version has a very different approach to HA that can easily see someone from the US being diagnosed with a different disorder to someone in the UK. Plus the US manual doesn't have a Somatoform Disorder group, but has Illness Anxiety Disorder to replace the old Hypochondriac one plus has an OCD Spectrum Disorders group.

So, understanding what HA is and the different patterns means understanding a bit more about which one you fall into.

Paranoia is well known to accompany anxiety and when I had it it was at the harder stages. It goes as you recover more. CBT is used to treat it like with anxiety.

Having rituals may mean OCD as GAD would have more "safety behaviours" than rituals like in the OCD sense. But rituals are not limited to OCD, many people have them who have no anxiety disorder. So, OCD is diagnosed where it is having a detrimental impact on the individual to prevent many people being diagnosed for no reason.

Can you see more OCD behaviours? I can't remember if I've seen you posting on the OCD board? And the paranoia about others hurting you, are there specifics to like contamination themes or poisoning?

I'm wondering whether it's closer to OCD and that's why I've added perhaps a lot about differentiation here as I think HA is misunderstood and this forum certainly shows OCD people posting on here because it's health related so this place is a bit garbled.

[Sam Winter]

thanks for all your insight, as for the paranoia of people hurting me it falls under death and pain, i'm always trying to avoid it, thats why i have issues with eating incase i choke which will lead to -death, i'm scared of people incase they try and kill me which would lead to -death, i'm scared of ignoring a pain i have as it might be a medical problem which you guessed it might lead to -death, everything i fear or do is linked to avoiding death and pain, i also keep doing certain things everyday like checking my eye or watching something while i eat as i feel if i don't do it one day something really bad will happen