Cyberchondria Treatment

Cyberchondria is excessive and often repeated online health searches that leads to increased distress or anxiety. The anxiety may remain long after the online searches have been completed. The online searches are completed to alleviate health anxiety, though the searches themselves lead to increased anxiety.

Signs of cyberchondria include:

• Spending one to three hours researching symptoms online
• The online searches making a person feel distressed and anxious, rather than feeling reassured or empowered
• The need to search for health information feels compulsive and hard to resist
• There is a need to seek reassurance from a medical professional and the answers given are not trusted
• A compulsive need is present to recheck symptoms online, sometimes multiple times on the same day

If a person has depression or anxiety already, they may be more likely to develop cyberchondria. The condition may also develop if there are personal experiences relating to illness, for example if there has been an experience of death in the family or if someone close has developed an illness, and an individual being worried for their own health.

Treatment of cyberchondria can address different targets, including health anxiety and obsessive-compulsive symptoms, behavioural responses to anxiety-provoking stimuli, management of coping with abundant or conflicting online health information, as well as addressing expectations of the internet. One of the adapted methods for treating cyberchondria that has been shown to be effective is a modified internet-delivered cognitive-behaviour therapy for hypochondriasis/health anxiety that also addressed cyberchondria. The specific components within cognitive-behaviour therapy that addressed cyberchondria included measuring improved online health information literacy and addressing ways of making online searches more productive and avoiding excessive and unnecessary searches.

Prevention of cyberchondria includes an improvement in online health information literacy, as this has been shown to lower levels of cyberchondria. Prevention would require addressing the factors that would increase the risk of cyberchondria, that include incorrect expectations of the internet, uncertainty about the reliability of the online sources of health information and difficulty with coping with an overload of information. Prevention would also require to clarify what the internet can and cannot do, including that it cannot provide explanations for all health-related questions, and that more information does not necessarily mean that an explanation or diagnosis can be reached.