YOUR HEALTH:A new book chronicles the lives of some famous hypochondriacs and attempts to explain the condition, writes CONOR POPE
THESE ARE worrying times for hypochondriacs. Not only are the usual grave concerns – cancer, chronic heart conditions, critical organ failure and devastating neurological maladies – as terrifying as always, they’ve been joined by a not-yet-fully-understood, airborne KILLER FLU VIRUS (it’s hard for a hypochondriac not to see the world through the prism of tabloid headlines).
While hypochondria is considered by most clear-headed people to be little more than an irritatingly self-indulgent, attention-seeking syndrome, it is very common – and very costly.
The Department of Health has no reliable statistics on health anxiety, but international estimates suggest that full-blown hypochondria is experienced by 1-3 per cent of the population, or up to 120,000 people in the Republic.
Despite its prevalence, few serious attempts have been made to understand the condition and those who suffer from it. Brian Dillon makes a valiant effort in his new book, Tormented Hope, Nine Hypochondriac Lives.
It explores, through the stories of James Boswell, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Daniel Paul Schreber, Alice James, Marcel Proust, Glenn Gould and Andy Warhol, the relationship between mind and body, and the terror of being ill.
In his brief introduction to the lives of others, Dillon nails the hypochondriac experience: the fear of some new ailment which is, unlike previous ailments, terminal; the depressing moment when that fear has to be shared with a loved one, jaded by countless boy-cries-wolf stories; the mounting dread as a doctor’s visit nears and the momentary rush of relief when the all-clear is given.
And then there’s another unexplained twinge somewhere and the fear mounts again. And again. And again.
The sense of “uncertainty as the moment of seeing a doctor approaches” is something Dillon has experienced many times. He struggled for years with health anxiety after the death of his parents before he was 21.
For most of his childhood, his mother was seriously ill with systemic sclerosis. She died when he was just 16. His father died five years later.
“I became convinced I was the next one to go,” he says. This conviction lasted well into his 20s as he struggled with chronic hypochondria and undiagnosed depression.
He is acutely aware that it is “hard to feel sympathy for a hypochondriac”, but he hopes his book “captures that sense of overwhelming anxiety” and how it can “take over your life and how extraordinarily difficult it can be to break out of it”.
“I’d like to think that I am totally recovered but I don’t think that’s completely true. It comes back when I am particularly stressed at work. It is at that moment that the doubts creep in and they seem to spring from nowhere really,” he says.
The bond that links the nine subjects in his book is how they used their hypochondria to try to control the world around them.
“It is a way of putting order on a chaotic world,” argues Dillon. “It is a way of ordering time, of submitting to examinations. Falling ill and getting better is a way of planning out your life. It can be a way of giving people space and time and a way of making sure every one attends to your physical and emotional needs.”
Charles Darwin used his imaginary illnesses as an excuse not to move in the society circles where he was much sought after the publication of On the Origin of the Species, while Marcel Proust took to his sickbed for long periods of his life, taking advantage of his confinement to write In Search of Lost Time. He was, says Dillon, able to produce a vast volume of work "because he withdraws and lives the life of an invalid".
For his part, James Boswell, the biographer of Samuel Johnson, moved to Holland to study law. It wasn’t a terribly good idea for a dissolute young man, and he spent much of his time drinking heavily and carousing with “loose women”, while all the while complaining of obtuse, but chronic, maladies.
To overcome his hypochondria, Boswell decided he needed to spend his time more constructively and so obsessively started compiling “to do” lists, which he failed miserably to do. This left him feeling still more miserable, inadequate and sick.
The Greeks conceived hypochondria as an organic disease originating in the hypochondrium – a part of the abdomen just under the ribcage. This detailed, if fanciful, diagnosis lasted over a thousand years before being reinvented as a psychological condition in Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, which was published in 1621.
It became quite fashionable in the 18th century during the lifetime of Charlotte Brontë when it was known as the “English malady”. “It becomes a marker of sensitivity,” says Dillon. “That is long gone. It has a psychological and moralised meaning today which we disapprove of.”
Another hypochondriac featured in the book is Andy Warhol, a man who eschewed the most highly advanced, highly priced medical care in history in favour of bizarre quackery.
“What is interesting about Warhol, and this is why he stands for the way many of us now think of our own bodies and death, is that despite all the knowledge and the expertise available to him he runs toward what seem like flaky and unreliable remedies for his illnesses.
“He becomes obsessed by crystal healing or visits his dermatologist when he has gallstones,” Dillon says.
The people he chose to write about “seemed to have a certain level of insight into their own hypochondria. They made something of it, producing something valuable despite the sense of always feeling crippled.
“In a way hypochondria is another name for an overactive imagination, but at the same time you would not want to overstate the link to creativity because these people were suffering,” he stresses.
The book omits some famous hypochondriacs – most notably, Howard Hughes and Woody Allen. Dillon initially planned to include the former in the book, but he says he found it very difficult “to get past the legend of Howard Hughes”.
He says that part of the tragedy for the hypochondriac is that their condition is “inherently comic and absurd and I hope the book conveys something of that”.
“I thought long and hard about Woody Allen and then I thought that if someone has expressed their own hypochondria as succinctly and wittily as he has done, there is very little for me to add.”
He does “slightly regret” not including a chapter on Michael Jackson “and not only for mercenary reasons”. According to Dillon, the principal tragedy of Jackson’s life was his inability to inhabit his body without the terrible desire to constantly change it.
“People talk about Michael Jackson wanting to become white, but actually, in a way, what he did to his body was an attempt to disappear, to become transparent. And that is a common fantasy among hypochondriacs, to reach a stage where you feel nothing, the idea that you could make yourself immune to the world.”
Tormented Hope, Nine Hypochondriac Livesby Brian Dillon, Penguin, £18.99