A family member of mine has had a deadly peanut/legume allergy their whole life. If they eat a tiny piece of peanut, maybe even the dust, or consume any other type of legume they can die in like 30 mins if they don’t have an epipen to inject to buy them more time, or they don’t receive immediate emergency room hospital treatment.

Over the course of her life she had a few frightening encounters after eating a peanut or legume without her knowledge in a food. She’d have to inject an epi pen and go to the ER asap. These encounters were obviously very traumatizing to her.

Fast forward many years and now she has become very strange and exhibits hypochondriac behavior. She will only eat like two foods - meat and plain rice, and nothing else for every meal. She will only drink spring water from a specific obscure company. She is basically “allergic” to everything now - window drapes, movie theater seats etc. Basically it seems like she wants to live in a bubble protecting her from everything in the world, because everything makes her “sick”. It is extremely unhealthy (especially her diet) and it’s getting worse as her fear grows. She is also getting into alternative medicine from something that seems like a cult from some random “leader” in Arizona. There diet and medical advice is very quack like and seems dangerous.

I’ve always thought her food allergy is responsible for her increasingly bizarre mental health. When one thinks they will die every time they eat, that must effect your mental health over the years. You can’t trust chefs or anyone’s cooking because they might have touched a peanut, or some peanut or legume dust got in the food. One would become very paranoid, fearful and anxious all the time.

I’ve been researching a bit but can’t find too much info on it. I️ found one article that seems very helpful, but it seems to be a condition that hasn’t been studied much... here is the paper - (I cannot link to the paper at this time because I'm a new user, but it's entitled "Psychological burden of food allergy" so you can google it).

Please help me on this subject. I️ fear she will become seriously mentally unstable soon, she keeps getting into weirder and weirder unsafe "alternative health" quackery trying to find a solution, and becoming fearful of everything while slowly blocking out the world...