Health anxiety

Health anxiety is a form of anxiety involving excessive fears and worries about illness that are out of proportion to the person's actual health.

Theory
Health anxiety may occur in people with a chronic illness, such as ME/CFS, people with minor or temporary illnesses, and in healthy people.

ME/CFS
The biopsychosocial model of ME/CFS assumes a person with ME/CFS must be fearful of increasing their level of activity or exercise, and that this fear is an illness belief that is not based on fact, but on exaggerated fears that exercise will be damaging to health. Effectively, this model assumes everyone with myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome has no ongoing disease process and suffers only the effect of physical deconditioning and behaviors such as a poor sleep routine. The suggested treatment is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to address these fearful illness beliefs, and/or Graded Exercise Therapy, a behavioral treatment to gradually increase activity and exercise levels.

Per Fink has proposed that the belief in having a serious physical illness is present in people with this diagnosis. A mental illness does not exist may be incorrectly diagnosed in people with ME/CFS; some people with severe and very severe ME, for example Sophia Mirza and Karina Hansen have been forcibly treatment in a mental health unit on the assumption that their ME/CFS symptoms were caused by a psychiatric condition.

Some people will have health anxiety in addition to ME/CFS. Conversely, in the International Consensus Criteria, a somatoform disorder must be ruled out in order to diagnose ME.

Evidence
ME/CFS is not a recognized form of health anxiety, and many people with it do not have any form of anxiety, or any other mental health condition. There is significant evidence of an ongoing disease process.

Notable studies

 * 2017, Contesting the psychiatric framing of ME/CFS (Full text)

Learn more

 * Wikipedia