The way modern medicine sees it, if you think you’re sick, but you’re not, then you’re really sick. Mentally, that is. Sound crazy? Look here (free registration required).
According to the Seattle Times, people who fake illnesses or who interpret every discomfort as a sign of illness are no longer dismissed as malingerers or hypochondriacs. Even the newspaper reporter is taken in by this obvious nonsense: “In fact, they do have a medical condition—just not the ones they think.”
It’s called a form of anxiety disorder, or health anxiety. Since such people want attention from doctors, why not call it “attention deficit disorder”? Oh right, that name’s already taken. The story goes on: “But reframing the disorder as one of undue anxiety rather than imagined symptoms has opened up new treatment strategies [e.g., Prozac].”
Note how the newspaper accepts this as a real disorder and regards the issue as only one of framing. On what evidence? It must be a disorder. How else could there be treatment for it? Do you sense some circular reasoning? The legendary skepticism of the newspaperman crumbles before scientific authorities. Such is the scam medicine has become, as Thomas Szasz has pointed out for half a century in a multitude of writings, such as this. Mimicking bodily illness constitutes mental illness. Mimicking mental illness (in the view of psychiatry) indicates an even more serious illness than other mental illnesses. This is sheer medical imperialism. Freud, author of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, rules!
At least the newspaper story tips off the perceptive reader as to what’s really going on. It quotes Dr. Wayne Katon, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine: “No smart doctor says to a patient, ‘I think you are a hypochondriac.’ That’s a quick way to lose patients.” But if fear of the loss of patients—translation: income—is driving the definition of disease, how can we trust anything the medical profession says? By the way, does the fear of loss of income have a medical name?
