Health anxiety is the 3am curse plaguing Aussie mums

News.com.au

15 hours ago

It was a tiny, crescent-shaped birthmark on the inside of my five-month-old's thigh that started it all.
Until that point, new motherhood had for me, mostly been the kind of oxytocin-fuelled, soft-lit montage of bliss you see in Huggies ads.
I had a 'good' sleeper, a great support network and a new parents group who got together for champagne brunches. We were killing it, my baby and I.
Then the birthmark.
Surely it had been there since he was born, but for whatever reason, I noticed it one morning and couldn't stop fixating on what it meant. Convinced it was a sign of some sinister illness, I followed the Reddit-Mumsnet-Web MD rabbit hole down to the most obscure depths of Dr Google.
By nightfall I'd diagnosed him with a serious, degenerative neurodevelopmental disorder. My mother was staying with us at the time; she found me in the bathtub with my baby, sobbing and panicked while he stared up at me, bewildered by the fuss.
A GP visit, ostensibly booked to confirm my baby's diagnosis, morphed into a referral to a psychologist and a diagnosis of health anxiety.
Health anxiety, also known as illness anxiety disorder or hypochondria, is a form of anxiety that manifests as intense fear of having or developing an illness, even when there is little evidence to support the belief.
Except rather than worrying about my own health, I was fixated on that of my baby.
'It's called health anxiety by proxy,' explains psychologist Anoushka Dowling, of the lesser-known condition.
'And it is the same fear and preoccupation, but this time directed at the health of your children. It is fearing the worst from minor symptoms, for example: 'what if this headache is actually a brain tumour?'
According to Dowling, there are several telltale signs a person might be experiencing health anxiety by proxy.
'They will likely be constantly thinking about or talking about a particular illness or health related worry,' she says.
'They also may be checking for signs and symptoms, and usually turning to online sources to find more information. A person with health anxiety may either repeatedly seek assurance from health professionals, (oftentimes more than once because of a fear of signs being missed) OR they will avoid health professionals altogether out of fear that their worries will be validated.'
Dowling says that while worrying about your child's health is, to some extent, a normal part of parenthood, fixating to the point that it causes you distress or is without evidence means there could be a problem.
The advent of 'Dr Google' (where every headache is a tumour and every bruise is leukaemia) has exacerbated things she says, as has, more recently, Covid.
It all sounds very familiar.
While that first acute episode of health anxiety by proxy was by far the worst, there have been other periods in my nine years as a mother where it has raised its ugly head.
And while therapy has helped mostly overcome the 3am curse that would keep me awake, googling in a cold sweat, it's also been a numbers game: the sheer volume of times I've assumed the worst, only to be proven wrong.
On the surface, some of my more dramatic moments have been laughable, were it not for the real panic underpinning them.
The time I took my second newborn to the child health nurse over concerns she yawned too much, for example. Or the ultrasound I demanded of my son's skull because I was sure it was 'too bumpy'.
And yes, Covid, with all its uncertainty and hand-washing and invisible threat, left me grappling for a time with a rising dread every time a runny nose or a fever spiked.
It's an experience borne out in the numbers: studies clearly show that health anxiety has increased in the past decade (with a decent boost delivered by the pandemic), and while, as a relatively new condition, there aren't a lot of epidemiological data on health anxiety by proxy, experts say anecdotally they're encountering it more frequently as well.
'The sheer volume of information on the internet means that we can find something to confirm almost any fear we have,' explains Dowling.
'Increased feelings of anxiety can inhibit our brain's ability to critically analyse information and increase our tendency to look for information that confirms our fears rather than alleviates them. The internet is great for many things, but self-diagnosis is not one of them! We're way too biased about ourselves, and particularly about our children to gather and interpret information effectively.'
Instead, Dowling suggests reaching out to speak to your GP or a psychologist if you suspect you might be suffering from health anxiety by proxy.
'Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is generally the most effective form of treatment for health anxiety, as it involves identifying distorted thinking and uses evidence-based reasoning to challenge the thoughts,' she explains.
'It will also include relaxation techniques, exposure therapy and behavioural activation to ensure that a person is still able to fully participate in life, because one of the major impacts of leaving health anxiety or healthy anxiety by proxy untreated is the risk of disengaging from everyday activities.
'You may stop socialising, take your child out of school or daycare, or simply stop engaging in activities that once bought you or your child joy, out of fear of serious illness. The excessive worry and preoccupation about illness makes it challenging to enjoy life - which is something that it is definitely possible to treat.'