(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
The Internet has become "the biggest playground for hypochondria ever", claims the English author and journalist Caroline Crampton (b. 1988) in a new, well-written book about the history of hypochondria. Health anxiety is amplified by algorithms and search engines, and the web becomes a megaphone for hypochondria: People search for headaches and end up with brain cancer.
The phenomenon was dubbed 'cyberchondria' about 20 years ago. The word cyberkondri is hardly used in Norwegian, nor has the term 'internet mortgage' caught on. An English survey by Imperial College London in 2017 reported that one in five doctor visits in the UK's National Health Service were related to irrational fear of one's own healthstate with reference to the Internet. This was estimated to cost £420 million a year. In addition, there are millions spent on tests and scans (source: The Guardian 7.09.2017/XNUMX/XNUMX). However, hypochondria is a phenomenon known from the entire history of the West.
I Moral Thoughts (1744) depicted Louis Holberg similar to his as a tyrannical spouse: «I have a court mistress who dominates more strongly than 10. Xantippæ [Socrates's wife] or mature women. I have a stomach that keeps me in constant servitude, that prescribes the harshest laws for me, even commands me to hate myself. Self-hatred is the content of my stomach's law book [...].»
Holberg was a hypochondriac. 'Hypochondrium' etymologically means that which is below (gr. hypo) the cartilage (gr. in the chondros) on each side under the rib arches in the upper part of the abdomen. The gallbladder is on the right and the spleen behind the stomach on the left.
Crampton points out that today the concept of hypochondria is detached from its physical origins in the stomach region. In 2013, the diagnosis 'hypochondriasis' was removed from the fifth edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). Now it's called 'illness anxiety disorder', anxiety about having or getting a serious illness, or 'somatic symptom disorder', symptoms and disorders doctors are unable to detect or explain. It would therefore be too easy to say that hypochondria has been transformed from stomach trouble to health anxiety, since both the psychological and the physical are still present in an unpredictable and incomprehensible way.
Self-delivery
Crampton himself had cancer for 5 years from when she was 17 to 22 years old. She then developed hypochondria and became particularly cautious and alert to possible symptoms. The author thereby appears as a trustworthy character (ethos) with credibility. Crampton began as a writer in the early 2010s, "when the so-called first-person industrial complex was transforming journalism". The term "the industrial first-person complex" was launched in 2015 by Laura Bennett, who in the online magazine Slate.com took issue with the personal self-disclosure essay. In 2017, Jia Tolentino was able to state in The New Yorker that "The personal-essay boom is over". Unfortunately, it was probably too hasty.
Crampton's description of his own illness and hypochondria never really becomes intimately tyrannical or intrusive.
Despite ironic distance to self-deliverysgenre's formula "Why I as an X feel Y about Z" (p. 186), Crampton has nevertheless now for the first time written about his own illness. This gives the story of hypochondria a committed twist, but does not add any additional insight to the case. The amazing thing, however, is that Crampton's description of his own illness and hypochondria never really becomes intimately tyrannical or intrusive.
Crampton does not tell about the path from suffering to health. The hypochondriac is "stuck in the first scene of the drama", there is no progression, no development. To the extent that Crampton manages to explain his own hypochondria, is due health anxietyone that previous illness is re-experienced as traumatic. A small coincidence can trigger the trauma. It is unbearable to live when the fire alarm goes off all the time, writes Crampton. The defense against traumatically triggered health anxiety therefore becomes dissociation, separating soul and body. Continuous self-observation in search of signs of disease (recurrence of the cancer) is nevertheless part of the problem. The distanced portrayal of own disease is part of the hypochondria!
Therefore, Crampton's description of hypochondria becomes somewhat immobile, even though she has managed to tell an informative story from Hippocrates to the present day, with both fictional examples such as Molière (The imagined sick) and Proust, and philosophers and scientists such as Kant and Darwin.
Crampton manages neither to solve the riddle of psychosomatics nor to explain the relationship between soul and body. And that is obviously too much to ask – since no one knows exactly how soul and body affect each other. Her own hypochondria is rooted in actual illness (cancer), and she claims that all the hypochondriacs she mentions, in addition to hypochondria, also had illnesses that were treated and diagnosed. However, there are hypochondriacs who have not had a traumatic experience of real physical illness. Thus, the author's can autobiographicale perspective become restrictive.
Hypochondria as a civilizational problem
A search at the National Library shows that the term 'health anxiety' did not appear in print until 1990, but now the word is becoming increasingly popular. 'Health journalism' was not used until 1980. Ingvard Wilhelmsen (b. 1949) founded Norway's only clinic for hypochondria in Bergen in 1995 and has also written books on the subject.
The social worker Per Fugelli (1943–2017) already spoke 25 years ago in the book Red recipe about "Dagblad diseases". He concluded that there were "strong commercial, technological and professional forces that try to brainwash people in the direction of fear of disease and health perfectionism".
If one has to feel 'well-being' all the time in order to be healthy, most people will fail.
World Health Organization WHO defined health in its 1946 constitution as "complete physical, mental and social well-being". One might ask whether this ideal is not apt to produce hypochondria. If you're a little sore, grumpy or can't fall asleep right away – does that mean you're in poor health? If one has to feel 'well-being' all the time in order to be healthy, most people will fail.
It has long been pointed out that health in the West has replaced religion as a moral agency. The sociologist of religion Bryan Turner wrote in the book The Body and Society (1984):
«The modern medical regimen implies a certain asceticism in morals as the main defence against sexually transmitted diseases, heart disease, stress and cancer. In this sense religious norms of the good life have been transferred to medicine.»
This problematizes how secularized modernity really is. The rationalization of society has at the same time produced a new one irrationalism. The self-monitoring of the hypochondriac replaces self-examination for sin with possible symptoms of diseases. The health hysteria becomes a new religion.
The public is inundated with advice about exercise, diet, healthy eating, health hazards, new symptoms etc. The war headlines in health journalism play on our fear of death. And the pharmaceutical industry is always ready with new drugs. The Ministry of Health and Welfare receives the most money from the state budget.
Health in the West has replaced religion as a moral agency.
But of course the doctors cannot eradicate death – yet. Because as a hypochondriac said: "Life is a sexually transmitted disease with an absolutely 100 percent fatal outcome." When we have nothing else to believe in, we cling to the idea of living as long as possible: the "growth" paradigm has hit this area too: Bigger, stronger, better: longer life!
The hypochondria
Hypochondria was formerly an upper-class phenomenon. The title of Crampton's book: "A body of glass" refers to the late 1300th-century French king Charles VI who would not be touched because he believed he was made of glass and could be broken on contact. Now hypochondria has been democratized. Health anxiety is one ideology which keeps the subjects in place in an iron cage with self-observation as a prison guard. The oppression is internalized in the subject. As Holberg wrote:
"There is thus a constant war between my appetite and my stomach, if it can otherwise be called a war, where one always beats and the other always gets hit."
