You might be scoffing to yourself, “I am not a hypochondriac!” But in truth, it is a lot more than just the commonly misjudged illness of over-exaggerating/ feigning your illness.

By definition, a hypochondriac is someone who is “abnormally anxious about their health.” Well think about it, aren’t we all anxious about our well-being? We slowly back away from the people who cough and sneeze all throughout class, and no one hopes to get the flu.

So, what turns the norm into abnormal? The continual worrying about your health and the belief that “any symptom or sensation is a sign of a serious illness” causes the abnormal unease. Now, I’m not saying we all sit in our rooms and look at the way our fingertips grow slightly curved to the left and Google it to make sure we don’t have cancer of the fingernails, because only a few do that, and being a hypochondriac is a severe illness. All I’m saying is that our fears play into our belief and participation in mass hysteria.

Rewind and take the Ebola outbreak that happened just a few short months ago for instance. The more we read about the deadly affects and all of the people suffering, we began to get a little nervous. And then, once the first case in the U.S. broke out in Texas, we got even more anxious, thinking “is it going to get to Michigan?” And then a woman who was in Ohio was reportedly showing symptoms. That Ohio case got all of us Michiganders worried. Had she traveled to Michigan? There a decent amount of students at GVSU from Ohio, did they catch it? Is it in Michigan?

So, like any other curious and worried college student, we searched Google for the symptoms of Ebola. And then, everyone started to sweat a little bit more. You read that one of the symptoms is a fever, and you started to feel a little warm, and your hands got clammy. Your breath got shallow as you read that breathing problems could also be an early warning sign. The longer the list, the surer you were that you could have Ebola.

Fast forward to present time again. Hind-sight is 20/20, and we realize that there was no way any of us even had the chance to get Ebola unless we had traveled to Sierra Leone or Liberia or came in contact with someone diagnosed. But still, mass hysteria erupted and people flocked to the clinics to get tested and make sure their headache wasn’t actually a sign of Ebola.

Mass hysteria, I believe, is more contagious than any disease itself. Of course there are certain things such as a common cold or the flu, which people hardly seem to fret over since they are so common nowadays.

Don’t let mass hysteria get the best of you.