Abstract
In this chapter, the authors consider the digital space and its technologically enabling effects on clients suffering from cyberchondria. Anonymised accounts are used to explore how, in the digital space of cyberchondria, rational people like Paul, Simon, and Tracy are broken down into assembly of compulsive behaviours and anxiety, always with an escalating nature. Using solution focused techniques like ‘the miracle question', ‘exception seeking', ‘problem free talk', and ‘detailing scales', the authors share their experiences of the murder and snake oil that is cyberchondria. They review how the literal and hypothetical ideals of solution focused practice offer new perspectives to the treatment of cyberchondria as clients require not logic but hope to retake control of their post-cyberchondria recovery.
TopPart 1: Theoretical Background
In this section the authors intend to do 3 things. First, introduce the digital space and how their 25-year interest in solution focused practice (suspiciously the same time the authors have emerged digitally) helped negotiate their understanding of how cyberchondria has become something that all those years ago didn’t exist. Second, and as already suggested, the authors offer the notion of cyberchondria as analogy for murder. Then third, they explore how the digital space operates just like the deception of the snake oil touting trickster of the past. These 3 things (perfect crime, perfect pathology and perfect context) are metaphors for explaining how people make the online and offline choices they do. Furthermore, the section argues that the digital space has a range of illusion akin to any charlatan from the wild west. It is one thing being responsible for one’s own health, but another when the tools used to do it are perfectly sharpened to exacerbate escalation.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Snake Oil: It is a substance with no medicinal value and usually sold as a remedy for all diseases.
Signs and Semiotics: Anything (objects, symptoms, materials, abstracts, words) that conveys a meaning, reference or representation of something to the interpreter or user of the sign. Semiotics is the study of signs.
Simulation: Simulation is a term used for situations where something appears to be real like an illness, yet it has no connection with the original, the body or health, a real thing any longer.
Murder: It refers to Baudrillard metaphor of how social and technological processes, particularly media, have replaced the real illnesses with digital representations, images, and impressions.
HyperReality: It describes a reality that is generated by simulated forms, like cyberchondria based on digital models without an origin.
5R’s and the Route Map: Formulaic interventions which aim to reinforce the desire for pragmatic outcomes, the appreciation of stoic human values and constructionist recognition of languages mediating effects. These all being relevant to the underlying philosophy of the solution focused approach to overcoming cyberchondria.
Perfect Crime: It links to Baudrillard metaphor of murder. Cyberchondria is like the perfect crime, where the crime scene left behind makes it hard if not impossible to identify the criminals, victims, or motives.
Digital Space: It involves both online and offline personas in seemingly equal measure what once were two different places for experiencing selves and the world.
Symbolic Exchange: It is a reference to communication, actions and other forms of exchanges that happen for reasons other than the traditional understanding of usefulness or having essential values.
Skeleton Keys: These keys open any diagnostic lock. They stand for an important concept in solution focused practice that is the understanding of the problem is not necessary for a solution.