You're listening to the Michael Sherman Show.

Welcome to the Michael Sherman Shower Show. Welcome to the Michael Shurmer Show.

I'm your host Michael Shurmer.

My guest today is Suzanne O'Sullivan

and her new book, The Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories of Mystery Illness.

Suzanne is an Irish neurologist working in Britain, her first book, Is It All in Your Head, True Stories of Imaginary Illness,

which won the 2016 Welcome Book Prize and the Royal Society of Biology General Book Prize. She lives in London and as you'll hear in the

show she travels quite a bit. What I like about her is that when she

investigates a mysterious illness, these anomalous psychological experiences and phenomena that people

have, she actually goes there to check out what the social environment is like, the physical

environment, the people involved in and

surrounding the victims of these mysterious illnesses and so forth. So we get

into that, what that was like as a neurologist. I think of her as kind of an Oliver Sachs, which I find very interesting because I study weird things and a lot of weird things that people experience are explained by these anomalous psychological phenomena

which go by various names. Let's see conversion disorders, psychosomatic disorders,

functional disorders, mass psychogenic illness,

folk illness, mass hysteria, biosocial disorders, psychogenic or sociogenic disorders, and her preferred term functional neurological

disorders or FNDs.

So we go through the various ones that she writes about in the book. Each chapter is a different

example of this. She goes to Sweden and finds these asylum seekers who have been declined from these various countries that they don't want to go back to and find that they fall into these mysterious sleeping disorders,

not just for hours or days, but weeks, months, even years.

And from there, she travels to Kazakhstan and Cuba and Colombia and it's really quite the narrative

story here about this. She even has a story about a woman who almost died of a broken heart. How does that happen?

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