Hypochondriasis and self diagnosis

As my Summers' spare time start to shrink down to a week before work comes back with a light tap on my shoulder come next Monday morning, I've started to reflect upon issues that some people around me, and non-relatives have. It is with a mixed feeling of both amusement and sadness I think upon the problems of hypochondria and the need to diagnose one's own health.

I have people close to me that clearly have health anxieties, to various degrees. Usually they're just over-zealous when it comes to staying healthy, plus some of them aren't in their twenties anymore and can take a keg of beer and expect to feel like a king the day after, if you catch my drift. But besides the somewhat normal jitters, heebie jeebies or whatever people call it nowadays - with regular complaints of them having a hoarse voice yet again or showing signs of a cold or something as mundane - they basically live their lives without having to structure everything around health checks or becoming neurotic fruitcakes.

What can be more problematic is the loneliness of your own mind. In your own fantasy you can be a king, an emperor of the world, a villain or just a schmuck with an incredible luck of jumping danger at every turn. This is the egoistic, narcissistic part of yourself that usually rears its ugly head only in the shadows, stay away from the light of society. And if you want to, you can keep it company long enough to develop some really fucked up version of reality, including your own. Cabin fever can do this to you, if you stay in-doors long enough, devoid of other people.

On the other hand, loneliness, in different forms, might work the other way around. It is easy to assume that, given that you have an empathic individual that desperately searches for human companionship, be it sexual, relational or strictly platonic, this person can as easily develop some strange sensation of make-believe connection to other people, or moreover ones own mental health. That would be a deceiving way of dealing with ones own feelings. Robinson Crusoe comes to mind, when you think about it, for who can truly say that fictional literature can't tap the fabrics of truth and wisdom? Also, it is one thing to know the truth, and it's another thing to know what to do with it.

When it comes to psychological issues, the human brain is a complex piece of machinery. You can't simply relocate a wire and hope that'll fix it. The pathology of mental illness can be messed up in more than one way, for example trying to diagnose yourself, without the input of a professional. A soul sickness, as the Good Book calls it, is an imbalance of the four fluids, or so they thought, back in the day. Nowadays it's commonly referred to the social and medical factors of childhood development, genetical inheritance and the general environment of society the subject lives in. A self-diagnose can create many misconceptions, build a wall of disinformation and lead the troubled mind into narrow paths of dubious treatment, or worse, into harms way. One example I noticed a couple of months ago, was this confused person. It was well over six months since I read her blog, but these last days I remembered her when I started to think about hypochondria and peoples need to self-diagnose. I feel sorry for her frustration and urge to certify the symptoms of her problems, mainly because she might not even have a clue what the real cause of her problems are, only that she's not feeling well and don't know what to do about it. In the Swedish rehabilitation system, there's an informal term for people with multiple diagnosis as "double-diagnosis", meaning someone with both drug - and mental problems. An easy example is a drug addict with a depression. Question here is, what came first, the depression or the drugs? Laymen can debate this amongst themselves for countless hours and still don't get any smarter, except that one got a gut feeling about how things are supposed to be done, which doesn't help anyone practically. Therapy, be it cognitive or conversational, can at least narrow down all the bullshit that can cluster up in a monkey-ridden head. To minimize the damage, so to speak, and hopefully change the path of mental progression.