presentation

Student’s Last Name 3

The subject that I’m going to present is the most horrible thing that ever happened in my life. About 4 years ago in my back home Iran, my mother who was 55 years old that time and always very careful about her health in whole her life, started to feel pain in her bones and muscles. The level of pain increased by passing the days. We went to several orthopedic doctors and they tested her blood and did a bone density test, they were the two things that my mother was testing every year in her annual checkup. When she got her blood test result, she realized that her ESR is above 90 mm that normal range is 0-29 mm/h for woman, and because my mother is a kind of person who herself search about everything on web sites she find out that upper ESR, can happen for many reasons same as autoimmune disease, cancers, and infections. Each doctor by seeing the tests result told her something different, one of them offer her to go to Oncologists because she may have cancer, the other doctor diagnosis of osteoporosis and the other Neck Arthritis. All these things caused my mother feel fear and anxiety, the pain of her arms and legs grow that much, she even couldn’t wear clothes by herself and she started to feel nausea all day mostly in mornings. We went to a lot of doctors and started to do test like endoscopy, CT scan, and x ray and for each of these tests my mother had this thought that she is harming her body because of radiation exposure. The doctors couldn’t find anything in her test result and my mother was getting worse by passing days, she started to cry each morning by the believe of she is not going to be healthy again and the feeling of nausea was annoying her a lot. She were feeling seek and had high heart beats most of the time, and she became worse sometimes in middle of nights and I took her to emergency room so many times during this period of time. She was getting worse and worse, feels like she is losing her mind, she was screaming and pulling her hairs and having believe that she is not going to hill and we will send her to mental hospital, for calming her I was just taking her out from home to parks and gardens and it was the only thing that made her feel a bit better on that day. Each doctor was prescribing different kind of medicine to reduce her pain and her feel of nausea, but she refused to take any of pain relieves, because she know that there are not the solution and the nausea pills was not working. After a while her cardiologist told her to check her results by psychiatrist. The first doctor by visiting her said that she has OCD about her health and prescribed her bunch of medicine, but after she searched about those on websites and seeing their side effects she refused to take them. Finally after visiting couple of psychologists and psychiatrists, one doctor make her trust on him and she started to took her medicines and my mother started to feel better, just taking that much medicine was bothering her, and recently she started to reduce her medicine doses.

Concept:

The concept I am using to explain my observation is Anxiety disorder, which characterized by excessive fear and anxiety in the absence of true danger, and obsessive _ compulsive disorder (OCD), which characterized by frequent intrusive thoughts and compulsive actions that can be found in textbook Psychological science by Michael Gazzaniga, Todd Heaterton, Diane Halpern fifth edition, chapter 14, on page (612)(616).

Explanation:

First, In category of Anxiety disorder, Health anxiety (also known as hypochondria or hypochondriasis) In the year 2012 regarded as a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) and categorized as a somatoform disorder, it is defined as preoccupation with fears of having, or the idea that one has, a serious disease, based on a misinterpretation of bodily symptoms. Hypochondriacs can delve in to the deepest depths of depression lengthy, unwieldy funks evoked by self-diagnosis and fear of the unknown. For example my mother had a belief of having a serious illness, and become preoccupied with bodily functions same as heartbeat and feel of nausea and physical sensations same as pain and weakness in her arms and legs. She had worries at first about osteoporosis, then fear of stomach cancer and at last incurable diseases. All her tests came out negative but her physical sensations was real, so they made her to worry more and caused more anxiety. In some cases hypochondria appears to be triggered by the death of a loved one, and in my mother situation, two of her aunts died, because of Alzheimer the disease that she know genes are involved and always had a fear of getting that, both in one month, one after the other. Those deaths were a shock for her and made her really sad and her problems starts less than one month after that event.

(I the other hand, according to the DSM-5, OCD belong to the obsessive-compulsive and related disorder category, while health anxiety is listed as either a somatic symptoms disorder or illness anxiety disorder, depending on the specific symptoms displayed. While there can be overlapping symptoms between the two disorders, and its also possible for someone to be diagnosed with both OCD and health anxiety, they are defined as separate disorders.) OCD is an anxiety disorder which time people have recurring, unwanted thoughts, ideas or sensations (obsessions) that make them feel driven to do something repetitively (compulsions), my mothers searching about everything related to her health on websites, doing checkups every six months and visiting several doctors without any trust on them, reading the side effects of drugs and believe of getting those side effects by taking them, all are examples of OCD disorder.