The Case for Hypochondria (Anna Altman, August 21, 2024, New Republic)
“Hypochondria has been called ‘the ancient malady,’” writes Caroline Crampton in her lyrical new book, A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria. “For as long as humans have had an understanding of health, there has been anxiety about it”—especially when that understanding is subject to superstition and misconception.
What happens with that worry—what behaviors develop, how much it hampers or deforms us, how it relates to our symptoms and our interpretation of them—is where things get tricky. If doctors tell us there is nothing wrong with us, but we persist in our anxiety, are we acting pathologically? Or are we experiencing something as yet unknown, at the edge of medical knowledge? Is hypochondria a somatic condition—a form of mental illness, an experience of the mind expressed in the body—or is it rooted in physical experience? Is it a diffuse anxiety about health, fear of contracting communicable disease, or the conviction that an illness is already present? Is it a form of obsessive compulsion? What is hypochondria’s relationship to diagnosed illness, anyway? Is it always an unhinged departure from what’s happening in the body, or is it sometimes a reasonable response to the uncertainty of corporeal experience?
It was bad enough when hypochondria was just a form of keeping up with the Joneses, but now that so many “conditions” have been valorized it’s also a way of making yourself seem special, without any risk of being judged weak.