Hypochondria

Hypochondriasis is a mental disorder characterized by obsessive thoughts about a person having dangerous diseases, although there is no objective data about them. This feeling of concern and worry in a person provokes anxiety, which intensifies as the disease progresses. This disease is most often diagnosed in middle-aged women. People in such cases adhere to the concept of “pervasive, constant bodily illness”; they think that their health is deteriorating and may become critical for life. Often, hypochondriacs seem to provoke their illness through self-administration of medications or independent interference in their personal lives. Often the culprit is severe fear, especially experienced in early childhood. Every person is afraid of something in their life, but alone it develops into a real phobia and fear of dying.

“Hypochondria” is an anxious and suspicious neurosis of obsessive fears (compression, cancer, myocardial infarction, psychosomatic disorders, premature death, as well as the consequences of diseases that have become habitual); nosophobia, which is of particular interest for its obsessive vegetative-vascular or vegetative-visceral symptoms, usually always the same for a given individual, involuntary, typified by it unmistakably and accompanied by the fear of death. Accordingly, the spectrum of obsessions consists of either fears for one’s own health (“phoboid component”), or painful ideas of shame and sinfulness, often “useless to anyone” and meaningless in their totality (“depressive component”).

Hypersomnia (hypersomnia stage) is characterized by a sudden onset, weakness of the patient immediately after waking up from sleep, sleep rhythm disturbances (insomnia when falling asleep early), irritability, fussiness, difficulties in concentrating and remembering new information. However, by lunchtime the patient feels significantly better compared to the previous day. Sometimes hypersomnia manifests itself as fever, even to the point of hallucinations. On hypersomnic days, the patient complains of palpitations and attacks of unmotivated fear. The examination reveals an increased heart rate. Multiple muscle changes are palpated, bulging of the intercostal spaces is noted in the sternum area