United States of Hypochondria

THREE YEARS AFTER COVID-19: LASTING EFFECTS OF DISRUPTIONS FOR CHILDREN

In his 1986 masterpiece Hannah and Her Sisters, Allen’s character, after receiving word that he has been spared a dreaded brain tumor diagnosis, skips along the hospital sidewalk in blissful relief before something causes him to stop: the realization that, while a brain tumor will not claim him in the coming weeks or months, something, someday, will. Although he suffers from something like hypochondria in real life — “alarmist” was his word — Allen understands the folly behind such thinking. To be paralyzed by the fear of death is to decline to participate in life. Allen was mining all of this for comic relief, but it’s no laughing matter.

Properly understood, hypochondria is something of a luxury. If you are in a position to agonize, worry, and fret over imagined medical conditions, you are in effect admitting the relative lack of suffering you are experiencing. No one actually laid low by a grave diagnosis or the imminent prospect of death would feel compelled to fear a hypothetical future laying low.

Even so, in the third decade of the 21st century, people have become gripped by hypochondria as never before. The coronavirus pandemic did not so much create this situation as feed and nurture it. Society was already bursting with gimmicks to stave off the inevitable — diets, supplements, trendy but punishing and unproven new exercise regimens. But three years ago, the health-obsessed among us were given a fresh justification for their fixation in the form of a poorly understood respiratory virus and brand-new tools to support it: masks, social distancing, remote working, remote schooling. In the early going, the hypochondriacs were absorbed into a broader pool of people understandably concerned about the mystery virus, but unlike the rest of us, the hypochondriacs have been unable to let go of their dependency.

It is tempting to regard those who cling to pandemic-era artifacts as performance artists. Anyone wearing a mask while driving, for example, has chosen a demonstration of his or her vigilance that has but one justification: to be noticed. But given hypochondria’s status as a preexisting condition, we might be better served to take the fearfulness at face value. The hysteria stoked during the pandemic has turned out to be not easily reversible: In recent months, #CovidIsNotOver and #BringBackMasks have trended on Twitter. The hypochondriacs are correct in the sense that this virus is as unlikely to recede as the flu — in a very literal sense, COVID-19 will never be over — and if their purpose in life is to avoid it, they will want the full complement of personal protective equipment in perpetuity.

For this constituency, only the discovery of the fountain of youth will perhaps compel them to emerge from their defensive position. Yet if the hypochondriacs would scrutinize their own position more closely, they would identify its fatal flaw: that viruses, along with car crashes, plane crashes, hurricanes, and lightning strikes, are permanent features of life for human beings on Earth. And since they will always be with us in one form or another, the sensible approach is to incorporate our attempts to avoid being harmed by them into our non-state-of-emergency range of behavior. If a co-worker has a hacking cough, feel free to avoid shaking his or her hand, but for Pete’s sake, don’t start working from home or wearing latex gloves in public.

Yet respiratory health is only one aspect of this phenomenon. If the current hypochondriac moment was confined to the coronavirus, it would be easier to nudge the forever maskers back to reality. And even if it wasn’t, the underlying anxiety wouldn’t be universalized. Regrettably, the hypochondriacs have more on their minds than the risk of contagion. These days, people, especially those with left-leaning political sympathies, have become worrywarts over all manner of things. Climate change is the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. Far less consequential things get similar treatment, such that in politics, it’s becoming impossible for many to distinguish between a hundred-year virus and the common cold. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai’s family was inundated with threats after a 2017 effort to cut internet regulation, and judicial rulings affirming religious liberty have been greeted with years of dystopian-themed marches and cries of the tyranny of “Christian nationalism.” Partisan Facebook memes in 2016 spawned a “disinformation” panic that by 2023 came to include a censorship wave involving America’s national security apparatus and government-funded global blacklists. College campuses have seemingly wholesale adopted the risible nonsense that opposing opinions are “literally violence.”

Where does all of this anxiety come from? Like so much else, it started in the home. So-called helicopter parents have begat a generation of offspring accustomed to being protected from every threat, including bad grades, bullying, and even sleepovers. “As a mom, all I want to do is protect my child, and if I can mitigate anything, then I will,” said Eva Marcille, who is part of a remarkable anti-sleepover movement covered recently in the Wall Street Journal. The sense of independence, resolve, and fortitude that comes from children navigating their world solo, even if it means encountering a mean peer on the bus or sugary drinks at a friend’s house, is sacrificed at the altar of staying safe. These same overprotected children become babyish young adults who expect their professors to step in for their parents, shielding them from offensive material (“trigger warnings”) and providing zones in which their minds will remain untroubled (“safe spaces”). On the rare occasions when these people get word of something in the big bad world that they disagree with, is it any wonder that they freak out? The hypochondriac overstates dangers often because he or she has been insulated from them. So do the helicopter-parented generations now in our midst.

Traditionally understood, hypochondria invites its sufferers to jump from A to Z. In Hannah and Her Sisters, Allen comes to fear a brain tumor after experiencing mild hearing loss — the unlikeliest of leaps but, for the hypochondriac, a perfectly sensible one. True to form, the modern hypochondriacs lap up the catastrophism rampant in political discourse: Presidents cannot merely have objectionable policies by their lights but must be said to be mentally incompetent or a threat to democracy. This sort of frenzied anxiety has a religious flavor not dissimilar from soothsayers predicting doomsday.

Hypochondriacs are also, by definition, self-centered. If they read about a disease, they are likely to be persuaded they have it and/or that it is more of a threat than others pose to them. Consider the case of climate change: Huge swaths of the Left are not merely concerned about rising temperatures but convinced, somehow, that such rising temperatures will affect them personally, adversely, and seemingly immediately. Witness Greta Thunberg’s cry of “How dare you!” — an admonition that would be appropriate in response to some slight Thunberg experienced personally but seems inapposite when applied to a concept as abstract and impersonal as climate change. Even Thunberg must admit that, since giving her speech, she continues to awaken each morning without the sky having fallen or the oceans having risen. Former President Donald Trump perhaps had the most appropriate, even rather fatherly, response to Thunberg when he tweeted: “Chill Greta, Chill!”

Yet for the hypochondriacs, the time to chill will never come. Such hyperbole could be easily dismissed were it not for its deleterious societal effects. In December, the journal SSM-Mental Health brought out a much-publicized study that, among other things, showed that liberal teenage girls experienced depression more than other categories of adolescents, including liberal male teenagers and conservative teenage males and females. Surely it is no stretch to deduce that teenage girls growing up in a media (and social media) environment devoted to rage, one that presents society as fundamentally, institutionally, and unchangingly hostile to the interests of, in this case, women and girls, does not produce happy campers.

People have been conditioned not only to become invested in fights that are rather remote from their own lives but also to do so at the expense of their own lives. How sad it must be to allow your political disappointments and frustrations to affect your own personal happiness because you have convinced yourself that every election everywhere in the country represents life or death for you personally. Even those profoundly alienated from the life of the nation still have, or should have, the satisfactions of their own daily lives: their family, their friends, their school, their job, their faith, their favorite bands, their unmissable shows.

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Such is the stuff of life, but if we allow ourselves to become whipped up by a virus, an election, or an uptick in temperatures on a chart, we risk missing all of it. Just last month, a Wall Street Journal-NORC poll revealed that people place less and less importance on bedrock values, including patriotism and family. We’ve become a country of unhappy worriers.

For those schooled in the religion of hypochondria, however, there is no sentiment that can overpower their sense of fear. That fear is long past the point of being an understandable desire to protect that which is valuable. It has become an affliction unto itself. Directing younger generations to “chill” may be far from a comprehensive road map to recovery, it is true. But it’s a good start.

Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.