Back around 2010, just before Halloween, a reporter friend retweeted a local police department’s warning to check your kids’ candy for drugs or razor blades or something like that. I asked, “Is there any evidence of something like that ever happening?”

She replied, “you never can be too safe.”

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This was a good reporter, but she considered it part of her job to warn readers about dangers, even those that didn’t exist.

I bring this up today because of a new study out of Sweden suggesting that health anxiety disorder (also known as hypochondriasis) may be deadly. To the extent our news media spends its time making people terrified about threats to their health — and in the last four years, that’s a significant portion of media content — it’s harming people.

The Washington Post summed up the study this way: “People diagnosed with hypochondriasis were 84 percent more likely than people without the disorder to die of dozens of conditions, especially heart, blood and lung diseases, as well as suicide.”

The article later says, “Searching for information about their symptoms on the internet can also worsen patients’ anxiety. ‘They experience a lot of suffering and hopelessness,' said Mataix-Cols, a neuroscience and psychiatry professor at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institutet.”

Which brings us back to the news media and journalists’ behavior during COVID.

The Washington Post, which has great coverage this week on the dangers of health anxiety, also employs a columnist whose entire public persona for the past three years has been stoking health anxiety and assailing everyone less paranoid than her.

The Washington Post back in 2020 also carried this gem of a column:

“You may think you’re totally safe because you wear a mask and gloves during the pandemic. But do you put alcohol up your nose and antiseptic on your eyelids when you come home?"

"I start each morning by taking my temperature with an infrared thermometer and my oxygen level with my oximeter. I check the conjunctival tissue in my eyes in the mirror; examine my feet for covid-19 toes, which are skin lesions or bumps…."

"When I come in contact with a person, I hold my breath and turn my face away, regardless of whether they wear a mask.”

That's not healthy behavior, but it's the sort of thing our news media encouraged and normalized.

“There’s no such thing as a good cold,” Vox explained in 2022. The point of the article was that it’s really dangerous to rely on natural immunity, and thus really dangerous to live your life. “When it comes to respiratory viruses, you never know what you’re breathing in: a mild virus that will cause a few days of snot, or something more deadly.”

Here’s a supposed “study” that went viral (sorry) and was spread by journalists warning that if you run or bike behind someone outdoors you are apt to get their COVID.

There was no study that said this. But journalists, who typically try to be careful not to spread unconfirmed declarations, seemed to think it was their job to scare people as much as possible about COVID.

I think they thought it was at worst a noble lie. But of course, the terror of COVID led to overly harsh lockdowns, led people to hide in fear (which was harmful), and it likely contributed to health anxiety.

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Beginning in 2021, everything was declared a symptom of long COVID, which made many folks even more terrified of ever getting COVID, and made anxious post-COVID people convinced that they had every possible post-COVID malady.

Parts of the media decided they should be scaring everyone at all times. This, it seems, is bad for the readers.