What Is Illness Anxiety Disorder?

Recently, the Savvy Psychologist email inbox received the following message from listener James: “I have a fear of having or developing an illness, not necessarily dying, but the fear that maybe someday I will be diagnosed with a disabling illness. I spend a lot of time on WebMD researching illnesses that I'm convinced I have.”

Well James, it sounds like you could have Illness Anxiety Disorder.

Illness Anxiety Disorder (IAD) may not be familiar to you, but here’s a word which may be: hypochondriac. Hypochondriasis used to be a medical diagnosis, but has been split into two new diagnoses: Somatic Symptom Disorder and Illness Anxiety Disorder. We will focus on the latter, as it relates to James’ question.

What is Illness Anxiety Disorder?

According to the DSM-5 (AKA, the bible of psychological diagnoses), Illness Anxiety Disorder is defined by the following symptoms:

• Preoccupation with having or developing a debilitating or life-threatening illness.
• The patient doesn't actually have any physical symptoms, or if they do, they're mild. If a medical condition is present or the patient is high-risk for developing a medical condition, their anxiety about it reaches epic proportions.
• Typically, people with IAD are either care-seeking (that is, frequently performing health checks and going to the doctor), or care-avoidant (they avoid doctor's appointments entirely, for fear of what they might learn).

9 Signs and Symptoms of Illness Anxiety Disorder

1. All-or-nothing thinking:  Seeing things in black-and-white categories, ignoring the shades of gray. For example: “I’m either healthy or I'm dying of an illness,” and, “If the test isn’t 100% accurate, what’s the point?!”
2. Negative filter: You pick out a single negative detail and ignore everything else. For example, if your doctor said, “Your nausea is probably due to a stomach virus,” you might start dwelling on the word “probably” and begin thinking about more deadly causes of nausea and ignore the doctor’s main message that there’s no cause for concern.
3. Rejecting positive information: For example, if your doctor said, “We’ve run the standard battery of tests and there are no indications of cancer,” you might insist that the test might be wrong. Similarly, you might discount non-lethal explanations of bodily complaints, such as assuming that your racing heart is a heart attack rather than a panic attack.
4. Jumping to conclusions: Just because...

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