WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Back around 2010, just before Halloween, a reporter friend retweeted a local police department’s warning to check your kids’ candy for drugs or razor blades or something like that. I asked, “Is there any evidence of something like that ever happening?”
She replied, “you never can be too safe.”
This was a good reporter, but she considered it part of her job to warn readers about dangers, even those that didn’t exist.
I bring this up today because of a new study out of Sweden suggesting that health anxiety disorder (also known as hypochondriasis) may be deadly. To the extent our news media spends its time making people terrified about threats to their health — and in the last four years, that’s a significant portion of media content — it’s harming people.
The Washington Post summed up the study this way: “People diagnosed with hypochondriasis were 84 percent more likely than people without the disorder to die of dozens of conditions, especially heart, blood and lung diseases, as well as suicide.”
The article later says, “Searching for information about their symptoms on the internet can also worsen patients’ anxiety. ‘They experience a lot of suffering and hopelessness,’ said Mataix-Cols, a neuroscience and psychiatry professor at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institutet.”
Which brings us back to the news media and journalists’ behavior during COVID.
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The Washington Post, which has great coverage this week on the dangers of health anxiety, also employs a columnist whose entire public persona for the past three years has been stoking health anxiety and assailing everyone less paranoid than her.
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