It’s easy to believe that everything you feel is life threatening when you are an anxiety sufferer. A racing heart is seen as a sign of a heart attack. A headache becomes a brain tumour, numbness becomes a stroke, a stomach ache becomes cancer and so forth. No matter how many times your doctor tells you that there is nothing wrong with you, you may never be quite convinced. All the thoughts you are having are a result of a tired mind. Your mind is tired of trying to protect you from what is not happening. When your mind is tired, it grasps every thought that comes into your awareness, pulling it in and creating something out of nothing.
The thing is that my thoughts that I fight against are not my own opinions. I could question the thoughts but It would make me answering them the rest of my life in row. Maybe some phucker is seeding my brain with these thoughts.
This sounds more like hypochondria than anything psychotic-related. I guess it could be put down to high anxiety, but it’s not in the realm of psychosis, per se.
Agreed. She’s probably aiming this at people with comorbid hypochondria.
I did read that believing you have an illness you don’t have is one of the most common delusions, though - we just had a thread with people talking about believing they were HIV+ or that they had cancer.
I read an article that mentioned a case of a patient whose sole symptom was the unshakeable belief that he was schizophrenic. He was diagnosed as such because of it.
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