It is not easy to help someone with hypochondria. Exposing yourself to the alarming symptoms of people with this condition can cause a lot of frustration, especially when it's a member of your family. This will be especially true when the resources you can use to help the individual are limited. In addition, patients with hypochondria often lack emotional validation of their complaints, which often leads them to prefer loneliness.
What is hypochondria? What is the cause of this disease? What can you do to help someone who has it? In today's article, I will try to answer some of these questions.
Regardless of whether the disease is potentially real or not, people with hypochondria experience the full range of symptoms they complain about. In other words, they don't pretend like that. While medical examinations may exclude the presence of a physical illness, hypochondriac patients will tend to request more tests and examinations to ensure that their suspicions are confirmed by others.
Hypochondria patients: emotional and behavioral components
Hypochondria is a condition characterized by extreme anxiety about one's health and possible causes of illness. The emotional component at the key here is a particularly health-related fear. An individual with hypochondria characterizes almost all of the signals from their body as symptoms of a potentially serious illness that threatens their well-being and even life.
This fear situation will usually be related to anxiety. These fears constitute the visible part of anxiety disorders, more specifically, generalized anxiety disorder (GAD).
Another important component of hypochondria is repetitive personal explorations about physical symptoms and the changes they trigger in the body. For example, moles, weight, injuries and pain types. They try to use these observations to show that their illness is real.
Hypochondria patients on the Internet: gathering information about diseases
What happens in a search engine when you type "headache"? Reading information on specific symptoms on the Internet provides data that they consider to be tools or tools for self-diagnosis of hypochondria patients. When they think they know what they have, they look for more information, but only pay attention to what confirms what they already believe. These people will ignore everything else. We call this an approval bias.
The search engines of the internet world are a double-edged sword in terms of feeding your health fears. It is great that this information is publicly available. However, if the information is misinterpreted and managed, they will cause a lot of concern to you and you alone. Because the Internet provides "evidence" to a person with a hypochondrium problem and persuades them that their problem is real, this can make intervention even more difficult. They don't believe that this situation is just the result of their anxiety.
How to help the hypochondriac patient
Actually, we can say that we all have varying degrees of hypochondria at some point. Right now, it's almost like a joke, if you Google any symptoms, you will end up thinking you have cancer. However, true hypochondria patients cannot be easily deterred by these habits. Even a doctor's opinion will not be enough to convince them that there is nothing wrong with their body. The individual is so convinced that they have a serious illness that even test results and medical opinions cannot do anything to alleviate their anxiety.
However, some strategies that can be implemented can help a person with hypochondria.
Confirm their experience. This is one of the most important points. Hypochondria sufferers often can't talk about their own symptoms and fears.
As a result, validating their experience will mean putting yourself in the other person's shoes. You have to try to understand how they felt under their circumstances. Try to see things through their eyes and understand the world from their perspective. This is of course not easy, and if you are not prepared in advance, you would normally normally do the opposite.
