For people with mental illness, there is a tremendous amount of pressure to hide their symptoms and appear "normal" in public. It's almost a prerequisite to be able to hold down a job or even go out in public without being ostracized. The original article refers to this as "masking".
What happens is as the underlying condition worsens, the victim simply expends more and more energy into hiding those symptoms. To outsiders, there is no perceptible change to the victim's behavior or condition. When the victim finally reaches the point of exhaustion, the collapse appears to come out of nowhere, or even to be faked.
Basically, the public expects to see a set of symptoms that are steady, or increase gradually over time. What you see in practice looks like normal, healthy behavior for months or years at a time, punctuated by dramatic breakdowns. (Or, in an effort to mask to the very end, the victim may abruptly disappear into hiding with or without notice until their symptoms are manageable again.)
If there's a TLDR for this, it's that, from the outside, mental illness looks very different from what you've been conditioned to expect, and it's not surprising that you interpret it as a form of hypochondria.
For people with mental illness, there is a tremendous amount of pressure to hide their symptoms and appear "normal" in public. It's almost a prerequisite to be able to hold down a job or even go out in public without being ostracized. The original article refers to this as "masking".
What happens is as the underlying condition worsens, the victim simply expends more and more energy into hiding those symptoms. To outsiders, there is no perceptible change to the victim's behavior or condition. When the victim finally reaches the point of exhaustion, the collapse appears to come out of nowhere, or even to be faked.
Basically, the public expects to see a set of symptoms that are steady, or increase gradually over time. What you see in practice looks like normal, healthy behavior for months or years at a time, punctuated by dramatic breakdowns. (Or, in an effort to mask to the very end, the victim may abruptly disappear into hiding with or without notice until their symptoms are manageable again.)
If there's a TLDR for this, it's that, from the outside, mental illness looks very different from what you've been conditioned to expect, and it's not surprising that you interpret it as a form of hypochondria.