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What is Illness Anxiety Disorder?
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This video describes illness anxiety disorder. Illness anxiety disorder is a mental disorder where an individual is preoccupied with concerns about having a serious illness. This is an interesting disorder because it's fairly similar to obsessive-compulsive disorder and there's even a debate in a mental health community about whether or not illness anxiety disorder is really just a variant of OCD. When we look at the criteria for illness anxiety disorder, there's another interesting feature. A lot of mental disorders in the DSM have a symptom criteria section and then other criteria, so there may be nine symptoms in the symptom criteria section and somebody might have to meet four or five of those symptoms to qualify for that criterion. There is no section in the DSM with illness anxiety disorder that has a number of symptoms where somebody only has to meet a certain number less than that for the diagnosis. For example, if we consider borderline personality disorder. It has nine symptoms in the symptom criteria, but an individual only needs to have five of those to qualify for that diagnosis. Again, with illness anxiety disorder, all the symptoms are required. The first symptom is a preoccupation with having or acquiring a serious illness. The DSM doesn't specifically say that this would be a mental disorder or a medical disorder, but most of the time we interpret this as relating to a possible medical disorder. This first criterion being related to medical disorders brings up an important point in terms of the distinction between a talk therapist and a physician. For example, I have a PhD in counselor education and supervision and I'm a licensed counselor. I'm not a physician and most talk therapists are not physicians either. With this particular diagnosis of illness anxiety disorder, as a talk therapist you would be working with somebody who has complaints or concerns about a medical disorder, so it's important to make the referral to a physician so that you know if they, in fact, have the disorder or don't. The second criterion is that there are little or no somatic symptoms. The third symptom criterion is the individual is experiencing a high level anxiety about health-related concerns. The fourth is that there's excessive health-related behavior like checking or maladaptive avoidance. A lot of times when we think of this disorder and compare it to OCD, it's this particular symptom criterion that makes it difficult to distinguish between the two. The fifth symptom criteria is that the disturbance has been present for six months, but the illness that the person is worried about can change in that time. A lot of times when we think of illness anxiety disorder, we think of one particular illness that the person is worried about having or acquiring. Sometimes with this disorder, if they have evidence that shows that they don't have a particular medical disorder they were worried about then they might develop a fear about another potential medical disorder. The illness can change, but the disturbance would be present for at least six months. The sixth symptom criterion is that this disturbance is not better explained by another mental disorder.
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