Post by Admin on Mar 7, 2022 19:30:34 GMT
Book Review: The ‘Mystery’ Illnesses Informed by Culture
In “The Sleeping Beauties,” Suzanne O’Sullivan investigates unexplained comas and other poorly understood disorders.
undark.org/2021/10/08/book-review-the-mystery-illnesses-informed-by-culture/
IN LATE 2017, media reports began to appear about a real-life 9-year-old Sleeping Beauty. Sophie, an asylum seeker who lived in a small Swedish town, had slipped into something resembling a coma for more than a year. Though medical tests suggested she was healthy, she scarcely ever stirred beneath her pink blanket. A clear feeding tube snaked from her nose since she never awakened even to eat.
While her condition wasn’t novel — others refugees had reported similar symptoms prior — Sophie’s mysterious stasis helped launch neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan on a book-length reporting journey. She had already spent years seeing patients with symptoms and disabilities, from convulsions to leaden limbs, for which no clear biological cause could be found.
O’Sullivan had thought of such illnesses primarily as products of the mind’s effects on the body. Yet the Swedish outbreak of what doctors called “uppgivenhetssyndrom,” or “resignation syndrome” in English, prompted her to consider how profoundly social and community influences guided the disease process — which explained why uppgivenhetssyndrom primarily exists in Sweden’s refugee community. “That single extreme example,” O’Sullivan writes, “was the reminder I needed of just how much society and culture matter in the shaping of illness.”
In “The Sleeping Beauties,” Suzanne O’Sullivan investigates unexplained comas and other poorly understood disorders.
undark.org/2021/10/08/book-review-the-mystery-illnesses-informed-by-culture/
IN LATE 2017, media reports began to appear about a real-life 9-year-old Sleeping Beauty. Sophie, an asylum seeker who lived in a small Swedish town, had slipped into something resembling a coma for more than a year. Though medical tests suggested she was healthy, she scarcely ever stirred beneath her pink blanket. A clear feeding tube snaked from her nose since she never awakened even to eat.
While her condition wasn’t novel — others refugees had reported similar symptoms prior — Sophie’s mysterious stasis helped launch neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan on a book-length reporting journey. She had already spent years seeing patients with symptoms and disabilities, from convulsions to leaden limbs, for which no clear biological cause could be found.
O’Sullivan had thought of such illnesses primarily as products of the mind’s effects on the body. Yet the Swedish outbreak of what doctors called “uppgivenhetssyndrom,” or “resignation syndrome” in English, prompted her to consider how profoundly social and community influences guided the disease process — which explained why uppgivenhetssyndrom primarily exists in Sweden’s refugee community. “That single extreme example,” O’Sullivan writes, “was the reminder I needed of just how much society and culture matter in the shaping of illness.”