As a linguist, I want to find the words to measure chronic illness

After skimming this article, it drove me to search for the term “hypochondria” which this article suggests afflicts 5%-10% of the population.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/hypochondria

Those afflicted with hypochondria spend 10x more on health care than the average individual, according to this article. May be a relevant driver for health care costs, and thus insurance costs. I’ve heard that every medical student at some time in their education becomes a hypochondriac after learning all the failure modes of the human body.

I think words are less the problem so much as evidence. The symptoms of chronic conditions kind of are what they do.

Maybe you could say something like: I planned to complete five items on this list today and only completed one, because I was too fatigued to continue and could not complete another item despite telling myself to do so or attempting to engage in the activity. This creates a goal-outcome gap in language. This is useful but the real problem is it's still open to challenge in terms of intangibles like motivation, work ethic, whether you deliberately set yourself up to fail to make a point etc. even if you have diagnostics to back it up.

But I think this is telling of a deeper truth in those cases: others considering you a burden and looking for excuses to lighten themselves of that burden. At some point there's no convincing someone who selfish in that way to believe something which they perceive to have consequences against their own interests.

We live in these ideologically competitive western societies, and at some point the tension between organisations' perception of their own competitiveness overrides the societal pressure to support people with problems into work.

That being said if someone with a chronic disease has evidence like a diagnosis and that's linked to studies backing up their condition and others are listening to accusations on the basis of unfalsifiable intangibles then at some point you have to consider those without evidence are probably not acting in good faith. This is really relevant when it's an employer, for example, but it comes up in e.g. politics a lot as well where it comes to taxpayer spending etc.

Edit: maybe there is a potential term in there like "supportphobia" to describe actions/speech which is designed purely to free an individual or organisation from the burden of supporting those with legitimate conditions.

Nevertheless I think goal-outcome gaps like that are pretty useful to explain what's going on. Especially if the goal is something simple like "staying awake for a normal period of time" and yet you find yourself falling hard asleep in the middle of the day despite having slept well for well over a week beforehand.

There's no hits for this in google or wikipedia.

Neither are there any for "faker's disease", so I'm starting to suspect we both made things up.

I was diagnosed with Celiac disease in 2014 via blood test and upper endoscopy. Before I was diagnosed I went to at least 5 doctors (that I can remember) complaining of symptoms.

When I said that I felt fatigued, I was told to sleep more. When I complained of joint pain, I was told that I was just typing too much. When I complained of mood swings, I was told it was just being a teenager.

Doctor after doctor told me that that I was a hypochondriac.

Celiac disease is not rare--it affects ~1% of the population--so statistically speaking, all the doctors who told me to stop faking it regularly see Celiac patients.

My story is incredibly common; every person with chronic illness I know has a version of the same story: being called a hypochondriac by many doctors before finally getting a diagnosis. (Diagnoses which, like my own Celiac disease diagnosis, are not wonky or controversial; they meet standard diagnostic criteria.)

I don't know think the entirety of that "5%-10%" of the population are actually hypochondriacs.