Phantom Illness: Shattering the Myth of Hypochondria

Challenging the popular image of hypochondriacs as self-involved, whiny complainers, freelance journalist Cantor portrays them as severely troubled individuals whose preoccupation with bodily symptoms and unrelenting fears about disease often amount to a severe, debilitating psychiatric illness. Psychoanalysts view hypochondria as a way of displacing anger against a parent onto a more acceptable target-oneself. To cognitive therapists, hypochondria is a learned response, more like a bad habit than a neurosis. Cantor, herself a hypochondriac, controls her anxiety and phobic tendencies with help from Prozac. Her informative report, written in collaboration with Fallon, a physician and clinical psychiatry professor at Columbia University, includes case histories, guidelines for persons considering treatment and a discussion of stress, depression, panic disorders, ulcers, chronic fatigue syndrome, psychosomatic illness and related problems. First serial to Ladies' Home Journal; author tour. (Mar.)