27-year-old Cecily* has all the time struggled with “debilitating” health OCD. “It can make me feel like I continually need reassurance on a regular basis that I’m not going to die,” she says. While Cecily has grappled with these feelings since being diagnosed with a chronic illness at 15, she feels as if society’s mounting obsession with ‘wellness’ has exacerbated her existing anxieties. Notably, at one point she became fixated on tracking all of the health data available on her Apple Watch. “I used to be continually checking my heart rate,” she recalls, explaining how on one occasion she went to A&E after her heart rate spiked because of anxiety. “In the long run they said I used to be completely effective – just very anxious.”
From Cicero to Lord Byron to Charles Darwin, people have all the time nervous about their health. In A Body Made of Glass: A History of Hypochondria, writer Caroline Crampton delves into the cultural history of health anxiety – or ‘hypochondria’, her preferred term – a mental condition characterised by the persistent and sometimes unwarranted fear that one has a serious illness. “The condition has been on quite a journey over the past 2,500 years,” she tells Dazed, explaining that physicians like Hippocrates used the term ‘hypochondria’ to discuss with conditions which were thought to arise from an area of the abdomen generally known as the ‘hypochondrium’, until scientific advances within the seventeenth and 18th century began to supplant the dominance of humoral theory. “By the early nineteenth century, hypochondria had turn out to be entirely a condition of the mind, fairly than the body,” Crampton continues. “That sense of it as a mental illness stays today.”
While hypochondria will not be a ‘recent’ condition, as Crampton also points out, it’s likely the rise of wellness culture has made hypochondria more prevalent. Notably, a 2020 study found that the proportion of scholars at a US university who reported feelings of health anxiety rose “exponentially” from 8.67 per cent in 1985 to fifteen.22 per cent in 2017. “Wellness culture encourages people to view their health as a perpetual work in progress and to be continually monitoring how they feel — two things that may heighten anxiety and preoccupation with illness,” she explains. “Moderately than having the ability to appreciate the health and capabilities that we now have, we’re encouraged to all the time strive for more, to be continually tweaking and improving ourselves.”
This chimes with 23-year-old Helena. Like Cecily, she too has OCD and particularly struggles with obsessive thoughts about her health. “I’ve all the time been predisposed towards anxiety over my bodily health,” she says. But she adds that consuming content about wellness on social media has made her anxiety worse. “It felt like I used to be helping myself, but really all I used to be doing was throwing extra money into the wellness industry and wasting my time online fairly than doing things that truly make me feel good.”
Broadly speaking, wellness encourages prioritising our health – which sounds good in theory. But because the industry continues to boom, it’s becoming ever clearer that this obsession with being ‘well’ could actually be making us nervous sick. We’re encouraged to continually self-surveil, with recent technologies enabling us to trace what number of steps we take, what number of calories we burn, what number of hours we sleep, and how briskly our hearts beat. At the identical time, the definition of ‘good health’ is shifting. Today, good health now not merely constitutes ‘not being ailing’: as an alternative, largely due to the spread of wellness, health is now commonly considered an ongoing project to be continually worked on.
“I see a whole lot of parallels between the supplements, diets and regimes which can be pushed now with the quack medicine of the past” – Caroline Crampton
“At one point I used to be taking handfuls of supplements every morning, listening to all these podcasts about nutrition, and watching tons of ‘what I eat in a day’ videos from personal trainers who also happened to be models,” Helena recalls, explaining that she would “beat [herself] up” if she didn’t follow the strict routines or diets she saw promoted by wellness influencers and “just turn out to be more anxious” consequently. “It was a vicious cycle,” she says. “I believe the wellness industry sells you a magic cure which only makes you more sick.”
It’s not irrational to fret about our health, especially as NHS funding cuts within the UK signifies that the state healthcare system will not be as reliable or robust appropriately. However it’s fair to indicate that the wellness industry is increasingly hellbent on manufacturing anxieties in consumers with the intention to sell snake oil-style ‘solutions’ right back to us. “One doctor I interviewed described a whole lot of wellness information and remedies as ‘1750s medicine’ and I do see a whole lot of parallels between the supplements, diets and regimes which can be pushed now with the quack medicine of the past,” Crampton says.
It’s value noting too that lots of the services flogged by the wellness industry are only accessible to the rich given their high price points. We’ve now reached a stage where private clinics are charging £400 for “a comprehensive general wellbeing profile”; corporations like ZOE and Lingo are shilling continuous glucose monitors to non-diabetics; and in a recent episode of The Kardashians, family matriarch Kris underwent a full-body ‘preventative’ MRI scan to screen for potential health issues, a procedure which cost an estimated $2,499. “It’s definitely the case today that there are corporations with business models predicated on the health anxieties of individuals with loads of disposable income,” Crampton says, highlighting that this chimes with the historical view that hypochondria was predominantly an illness reserved for the wealthy.
“The type of ailments you suffered marked you out as a member of a specific class as clearly because the form of clothes you wore,” Crampton writes in A Body Fabricated from Glass. “Conditions that got here from inside, like hypochondria and nervous illnesses, were related to refinement, imagination and mental activity.” But although there has long been a link between social class and hypochondria, she stresses that the condition doesn’t discriminate. “Recent research has actually suggested that lower socioeconomic status is related to the next risk of health anxiety, with the concept a scarcity of standard access to good healthcare options and to health education contributes to higher levels of uncertainty and anxiety,” she says.
Crampton, who suffers from hypochondria herself, stresses that accessible treatment is out there for hypochondriacs, and there are steps people can take to stop themselves from spiralling. “Personally, I do know that I even have to be really careful concerning the accounts and publications I follow, because if I see an excessive amount of wellness content I’m vulnerable to fall into anxious thought patterns I’ve worked hard to remove myself from,” she says. “Just having a lot details about health available, a whole lot of it not evidence-based, can keep our minds dwelling on points of our bodies that we’d otherwise not take into consideration fairly often.”
Cecily too says she has reevaluated her relationship with the more extreme side of wellness. “I do know what my limits are actually,” she says, adding that she has stopped wearing her Apple Watch. Similarly, Helena is attempting to put less pressure on herself and has stopped attempting to ‘optimise’ her life for the sake of it. “I’m trying to come back to see wellness as something different, a form of satisfaction with my life on my terms […] something which requires lie ins and night outs and bowls of ice cream fairly than, or in addition to, gym sessions and eating a healthy weight-reduction plan, because these are also things which make me feel well, grounded, content,” she says. “Because can we actually call it ‘wellness’ if it makes so lots of us feel so fundamentally unwell?”
*Name has been modified
A Body Made of Glass: A History of Hypochondria is available here.
