The actor Michel Blanc died at the age of 72 on the night of Thursday October 3 to Friday October 4. He died of angioedema according to several media. In 2010, the interpreter of the famous Jean-Claude Dusse explained to Le Figaro: “for a little pain, or a new redness, I consult! I always imagine the worst. There is the fear of death behind…”.
The director specified to Paris Match in 2015: “it is more linked to the heart murmur detected at my birth. I was raised on cotton. I was constantly told that I was fragile, that doesn’t reassure me. »
Later as a teenager, it was his mother’s cancer that exacerbated a deep-seated fear of death. I woke up and said to myself: ‘The cancer is spreading, it’s affecting the lungs, she’s going to die’ (…) The anguish of losing a loved one definitely broke the child in me.”
According to the 4e edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), hypochondria is a “preoccupation centered on the fear or idea of suffering from a serious illness, based on the subject’s erroneous interpretation of physical symptoms”.
Another element of definition, the patient refuses to believe the doctor’s diagnosis and is not receptive to his attempts to reassure him as to the absence of a serious illness.
What are the symptoms?
The patient fears being affected or developing a serious illness. This fear impairs one’s social and professional functioning and can cause significant distress and have an impact on family life in particular.
Some people self-examine repeatedly (checking the skin for lesions, taking their pulse, examining their throat in the mirror, etc.).
While some patients will have multiple consultations and do not hesitate to change doctors, others are, on the contrary, afraid to seek medical advice. Finally, the patient presents no, or only mild, somatic symptoms.
According to the MSD manual, “the diagnosis of illness anxiety disorder is confirmed if the person continues to be anxious about the illness for at least 6 months, while having no symptoms or only mild symptoms, and they was reassured because the medical examination ruled out any possibility of illness or identified a mild disorder which did not justify her anxiety.
What are the treatments?
According to this same site, the support of a trusted doctor can be useful, with a general practitioner in particular. Cognitive behavioral therapy seems essential. Taking antidepressants can also help.
“Those around them should not say to hypochondriacs: No, you have nothing! Hypochondria is a real psychological illness. We must therefore help them understand that it is not the body’s doctors who can help them, but rather the psychologists. explained psychologist Michèle Declerck to Le Parisien in 2014. The difficulty is to convince them to consult a specialist doctor.
A not so rare disorder
Renamed illness anxiety disorder in the DSM-V – the term hypochondria having been considered too pejorative – this disorder is not that rare. According to an Ifop survey for Capital Image in 2014, 13% of French people said they feared having an illness or were developing one even in the absence of any symptoms.
74% of them said they looked for a lot of information about this disease on the internet. 64% of them said that the more they learned about the disease, the more they feared developing the disease. And 44% said they consulted several doctors and carried out several examinations to be reassured.
To note : according to a Swedish study published in December 2023 in the journal Jama Psychiatry, people who suffer from hypochondria have an increased risk of dying from natural or unnatural causes, in particular suicide. The overall mortality rate was higher among people with hypochondriasis, 8.5 versus 5.5 per 1,000 person-years (which takes into account the number of people and the length of time they were followed). People with hypochondria died younger than others, at an average age of 70 compared to 75. And the number of suicides was multiplied by 4.
