An excellent companion piece to your coverage was published just yesterday in the BMJ. (https://www.bmj.com/content/380/bmj.p221) I particularly liked this passage:

"Our understanding of how people develop these symptoms is poor, but the starting point is distress of some kind. “Embodied cognition” is the theory that sensory and motor systems are integrated with cognitive processing. As O’Sullivan writes: “The body is awash with white noise, so symptoms can always be found if a person looks hard enough.” “Looking hard,” implies a conscious action, which is probably not what she intended. Those symptoms are then linked with illnesses, even diseases, we know about. “Illness is a socially patterned behaviour, far more than people realise,” writes O’Sullivan, “How a person interprets and reacts to bodily changes depends on trends within society, their knowledge, their education, their access to information and their past experience of disease.” Modern medicine offers an increasing range of diseases for people to unconsciously connect with.

The philosopher Ian Hacking has described a phenomenon he calls “Making up people.” New classifications “bring into being a new kind of person” who have the classification attached to them or attach it to themselves. Their symptoms may then be added to the new classification, changing, and expanding it. “The classification changes the person, who in turn changes the features of the classification,” which has been called “the looping effect.”