I was one of them. I thought panic attacks were some stupid made up thing for weak people, same with anxiety and the rest of them. Then it happened to me. And it affected so many things you wouldn't believe, from chest pains to fatigue to brain zaps to esophogal tremors to stool color even.
I will gladly eat crow, I'm only admitting as much because I understand how easy it is to dismiss psychosomatic ailments. When you don't have any to worry about, it's nearly impossible to begin to comprehend. I liken it to ghosts...some folks swear they've seen or experienced them, but I don't see how it's possible. I half expect to be proven wrong on that, also.
I believe ghost sightings are real - but caused by visual system trying to map inconclusive/limited information to something it already has a pattern for, and once a pattern (no matter how absurd) is found, it latches onto it.
AFAIK what we "percieve" of the world is anyway a hallucination produces by our brain based on sensory input. And particular conditions can mess this up briefly.
I've seen things twice that weren't there and realized what was going on only when got closer. First was when in the middle of the night I saw through a half open door my son (1 y at the time) walking in a room - I entered the room, and realized it was not plausible he could have been where I saw him a second a go. I backtracked what I saw and realized there was play carpet with road patterning on the floor, plus miscellanious kids stuff on the background. It was nearly pitch black. From my pov the scene mapped to my son in my visual system, and then it maintained this pattern just long enough for me to "see him walking".
Second was when I during a normal day observed what only could be two crows fighting or mating on a small tree. I got close. Really close. Then it suddenly 'stopped' being two crows and I realized it was just a black plastic bag fluttering in the wind.
I have no idea how to teach people of the fragility of our cognition in a way that would not involve a pathology as you had - realizing fragility of psyche is real similarly as death is real - but I feel realizing this would make people more emphatic towards all sorts of problems our fellow humans have.
Pareidolia (/ˌpærɪˈdoʊliə, ˌpɛər-/;[1] also US: /ˌpɛəraɪ-/)[2] is the tendency for perception to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus, usually visual, so that one sees an object, pattern, or meaning where there is none.
People have a lot of difficulty understanding things they haven’t experienced.
This leads to a number of people treating other people’s behavior as if they were doing it. If the only reason they would not be successful is laziness, then everyone who doesn’t succeed is lazy.
To them, it isn’t fair that other people get stuff “for free” when they had to work for it.
I will gladly eat crow, I'm only admitting as much because I understand how easy it is to dismiss psychosomatic ailments. When you don't have any to worry about, it's nearly impossible to begin to comprehend. I liken it to ghosts...some folks swear they've seen or experienced them, but I don't see how it's possible. I half expect to be proven wrong on that, also.