As we are all aware of the impact of corona virus on not just the physical health, but mental as well, did we know in the latest news of published by Lancet Psychiatry journal about one in five Covid19 patients develop psychiatric illness in the first 90 days of turning positive? [1]. On comparing the previous large-scale epidemics, one issue of immediate relevance for mental health that is novel for the COVID-19 pandemic is a potentially increased problematic Internet use. The internet is too widespread and the lockdown has paved way for the access to the internet as an essential part of life. The COVID -19 pandemic is characterized by uncertainty. In this uncertain and unpredictable environment, the natural way to gain some control is to collect more information about the novel virus. This excessive consumption of time on the internet about the virus has boiled down to Cyberchondria. Cyberchondria describes an individual’s anxiety about their well-being that is caused or worsened due to a relentless search of the internet for medical information. It was coined by a British newspaper in the early 2000s as a wordplay on hypochondria [2,3].

References

1. Taquet M., et al. “Bidirectional associations between COVID-19 and psychiatric disorder: a study of 62,354 COVID-19 cases”. Lancet Psychiatry (2020).
2. Jungmann SM and Witthöft M. “Health anxiety, cyberchondria, and coping in the current COVID-19 pandemic: Which factors are related to coronavirus anxiety?” Journal of Anxiety Disorders 73 (2020): 102239.
3. Starcevic V. “Cyberchondria: Challenges of problematic online searches for health‐related information”. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics 86 (2017): 129-133.
4. Starcevic V., et al. “Cyberchondria in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic”. Human Behavior and Emerging Technologies (2020).

Citation

Citation: Suprakash Chaudhury., et al. “Cyberchondria in COVID19 Pandemic". Acta Scientific Neurology 4.1 (2021): 01.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2021 Suprakash Chaudhury., et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.