The health anxiety to end all health anxiety

Been a terrible hypochondriac since the age of 8, and not using that term lightly. Have spent decades effectively alternating between ‘living with AIDS/cancer’ and experiencing various novel onsets of MND. In fact some 16 years ago I authored this piece, which some of you may find amusing (it made a bit of a splash at the time):

http://www.aboutbfs.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=893

Over the past 5 years I’ve been helping a friend who is suffering from a very real and scary medical condition called “delusional disorder”, which is a serious mental illness listed in DSM V. This person has the non-bizarre persecutive subtype, and is of course in complete denial about that, understandably preferring to focus all their energy onto the vast global conspiracy that’s being orchestrated against them by a gang of DETAILS REDACTED IN CASE THEY READ THIS.

Folks I shit you not, what’s befallen my friend is truly frightening. The following clip is very informative, so please take the time to watch it, as you’ll be sure to develop many of the symptoms as I have done:

https://youtu.be/YbSEybahiVA

And here’s a link to it from our favourite website:

https://www.webmd.com/schizophrenia/...ional-disorder

So... from researching delusional disorder to try and help my friend, have inadvertently discovered that there’s also a somatic variant. Freaking wow! Not sure whether this is technically the same thing as hypochondria, but the symptoms are a precise match for me (and “no” the irony of this isn’t lost).

Not surprisingly this has triggered anxiety about whether I actually have somatic variant delusional disorder, which is wonderful because it’s moved the focus away from dying, onto whether I’ve spent the past 40 odd years unnecessarily torturing myself. The key benefit of delusional disorder is that it’s a ‘real illness’ and therefore something very much worth fretting about. That was never the case with hypochondria because it had that stigma of being imaginary... and my imagination considered processing the prognosis of fatal diseases to be a far more critical pursuit.

In contrast, worrying about being delusional actually improves the symptoms, rather than making them worse. A whole new perspective just opened up. It’s like that movie “Shutter Island”, except with a happy ending in place of the lobotomy.

In all seriousness though, perhaps exposing us hypochondriacs to the truly terrifying spectre of delusional disorder is the best way to treat us. The metastatic tumour on my tonsil is already shrinking at the thought of it :) Jesus - it actually just dawned on me that I’m not terminally ill after all.

The health anxiety to end all health anxiety - fill your boots!