Agreed, Ananta. As the poet Muriel Rukeyser said: "The universe is made of stories, not of atoms."
However, there is also the Just World Fallacy, which shows that people tend to blame the victims of misfortune when something goes wrong. So in a sense, family and friends may be trying to protect the chronically ill from this fallacy by telling us to stop talking about it.
I'm a member of this group so I can learn and share. I've heard the paranoid and hypochondriac speeches from family and friends, though it turns out I have major medical issues that require ongoing care. It's just that outside the support groups I'm involved in, no one wants to hear much about it.
