Excessive health anxiety is associated with high levels of distress, disability and increased health care use.  It is common.  A recent study - "Health anxiety in Australia: prevalence, comorbidity, disability and service use" - reported "Health anxiety affects approximately 5.7% of the Australian population across the lifespan and 3.4% met criteria for health anxiety at the time of the interview ... Health anxiety was associated with significantly more distress, impairment, disability and health service utilisation than that found in respondents without health anxiety.

I watched a very impressive film last night called “How to die in Oregon” (tricky to get as a UK DVD, but easy to download on iTunes).  It’s a 108 minute documentary that was released in 2012.  The plot summary reads “In 1994, Oregon became the first state to legalise physician-assisted suicide.  As a result, any individual whom two physicians diagnose as having less than six months to live can lawfully request a fatal dose of barbiturate to end his or her life.  Since 1994, more than 500 Oregonians have taken their mortality into their own hands.  In How to Die in Oregon, filmmaker Peter Richardson gently enters the lives of the terminally ill as they consider whether, and when, to end their lives by lethal overdose.  Richardson examines both sides of this complex, em

Catero, my wife, and I are just back from four days in the South visiting friends.  We're blessed with some lovely friendships but, partly because most of us live pretty busy lives, it's easy not to see people who live quite far away for months or even years.  A while ago we decided to at least partly remedy this, so we booked four days off our work and contacted old friends who lived along the South Coast of England, from Dorset through Hampshire to Sussex, to set up reunions.  We got back last night.  Over the four days away we saw seven sets of friends.  It was lovely ... really heart-warming, poignant, fun, fascinating.  And that's what I'm writing about here ... the fascinating bit. We saw seven sets of friends aging and we shared how we ourselves are getting older.  We range from our mid-50's to late 70's (Catero & I are in the second half of our 60s).

I recently wrote a blog post "Grief is our natural human response to bereavement" where I said that mourning may well involve powerful feelings of yearning, disbelief, anger & depression.  When we have lost someone who has been very important to us, we gradually need to learn to live without them. Reconfiguring our inner emotional lives and our outer activities can be such a challenge.  Mostly though people manage.  It may be hard, but like the body healing after injury, emotional pain also resolves as we hold our loved ones in our hearts but engage more fully again in our lives.  Sometimes though after physical injury, wounds don't heal adequately.  Maybe there is infection or non-union of fractures.  In these situations the healing process may need help.