By Suzanne O’Sullivan
(2021, Picador)
In Sweden there is a group of girls who have fallen into an inert trance-like state for years. They are children of refugees caught in the no-man’s-land of drawn-out asylum applications. In Nicaragua there are outbreaks of a sickness that affects teenagers under a different kind of stress: symptoms cause them to lose control and try to run into the forest, taking several people to restrain each of them. Elsewhere at different times and places groups people suffer “unexplained” attacks that cause them to collapse and develop a range of problems, but each time with evidently no underlying medical problem.
The Sleeping Beauties is a thought-provoking book that follows the author’s investigations into these strange cases of groups of people suffering from often debilitating (and for some disabling) issues. She meets many of them and their families and follows how the illnesses progress and are treated (or not). O’Sullivan is a neurologist, an experienced medical practitioner, but what she encounters causes her to question a lot of how conventional Western medicine fails these vulnerable people.
Western medicine’s hold on people, and its sense of being systematic and accurate, makes it a powerful force in the transmission of cultural concepts of what constitutes wellness or ill health. But Western medicine is just as enslaved to fads and trends as any other tradition of medicine.
Suzanne O’Sullivan
The thread that holds the examples together is the area of Functional Neurological Disorders or what used (unhelpfully) to be known as “psychosomatic” illnesses or even “mass hysteria”. And indeed, the whole idea of labels and categories is very problematic in these cases and are understood by families and communities to be pejorative, as if the victims are “faking it”. The suffering is all too real. But she concludes that the roots of the problems are not so much in the individuals’ bodies or brains, but in the society in which they live. This leads the author to question a lot about how we think about illness and how our expectations of medicine are so different in different cultures.
She writes in the pattern of – and is often compared to – one of my favourite non-fiction authors, the late Oliver Sacks, whose books completely changed my attitudes towards mental health with his scientific insights and personal connection with his patients. But above all, O’Sullivan – like Sacks – in no way presents what could be, in the hands of sensationalist journalism or TV, a “freak show”. She writes humanely and respectfully about real individuals whose bodies have quite unconsciously reacted to their situation in ways that surprise everyone. And it makes me think differently about the complexity of our minds and how deeply connected we are to the community we live in.
Links
- Suzanne O’Sullivan – Wikipedia
- Review in The Guardian, 14 April 2021
- Support Independent Local Bookshops through uk.bookshop.org!
- More about FNDs on WikipediA (The Free Encyclopaedia)
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