Hypochondria and cyberchondria: the many ways to worry about health

So I've worked, um, in anxiety disorders clinics where we see a range of different people with, I guess, different characterizations of health anxiety.

This is Professor Jill Newby from the University of New South Wales.

She's also a clinical psychologist at the Black Dog Institute.

I've seen people who they're s- they're so worried about having an illness like cancer that they spend a lot of time checking their body, so like pressing their body, examining it for bruises, um, feeling it for lumps, and it gets so bad [laughs] that just that very act of compulsively pressing their body becomes painful in itself.

Mm.

So it kind of causes symptoms that they get very anxious about.

We see other people who are quite anxious about contamination.

They require all of their family to change, have showers, um, completely remove all of their clothes in a separate part of the house before they're allowed in the house, and so that kind of affects all the people around them.

Sometimes people with health anxiety avoid doctors altogether.

They're so scared that they'll get diagnosed with the thing that they're worried about, they don't see doctors at all.

But on the whole, they are disproportionate users of health services.

People with health anxiety use twice the health services as people with well-defined conditions.

So they use more services than people with diabetes, chronic pain, cancer.

Wow.

It's very costly to the individual as well because they often have a lot of out-of-pocket costs.

So we have found in our own research that people are spending up to $2,000 out of pocket in the last three months prior to when we've assessed it.

That's incredible.

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I've seen people who have been absolutely convinced they have a serious illness, so for example, HIV, and they've gotten 20 tests-

Oh, wow

... that have all been negative, but they continue to be convinced.

That reassurance and those tests and investigations don't reassure them.

Given the scenarios that Jill has described, you won't be surprised to hear that health anxiety can often overlap with OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder.

About 20% of people who meet criteria for illness anxiety disorder also meet criteria for OCD.

But actually, there is another disorder that health anxiety is most likely to overlap with.