Suzanne O'Sullivan @ 5x15 - The reality of imaginary illness
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 21 ต.ค. 2024
- Suzanne O’Sullivan has been a consultant in neurology since 2004, working first at the Royal London Hospital and today as a consultant in clinical neurophysiology and neurology at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery. She also works for a specialist unit based at the Epilepsy Society.
Alongside her work with those suffering from physical diseases, she has developed expertise in working with patients with psychogenic disorders.
Her book exploring the real world of psychosomatic illness 'All in Your Head' is the winner of the Wellcome Book Prize 2016.
5x15 brings together five outstanding individuals to tell of their lives, passions and inspirations. There are only two rules - no scripts and only 15 minutes each.
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Oh my that last part what she said about Amanda, I broke down because I could relate to her. I was just diagnosed with psychosomatic disorder and i'm in constant pain. Still people say, "oh you don't look sick" and "there's nothing wrong about you". It's sad when people give up on you just because you don't fit into their norm of how sick people should look. I wish people should have more compassion and understanding.
I just bought her book one month ago and it is a must read! She’s pure kindness.
This is very wise attitude.I wish all doctors understood
Paul McKenna treated a man for 'hysterical' blindness (the hospital diagnosed), after falling at work, and being told he would recover shortly. Eight years later he was still stone blind, with eyes rolled up into his head, flickering constantly and couldn't bear any light as it caused pain. After seeing him for a while P.M sent him to a specialist as his 'hysterical' blindness wasn't responding as fast as P.M expected (though his eyes had lowered to roughly the right position, stopped flickering and hurt less). As technology had moved on after eight years, this specialist was able to say categorically, that the patient had actual and very real brain damage to his visual cortex, due to falling back onto the edge of a pile of paving slabs. As some progress had occurred, P.M and patient carried on to see if any more improvements could be made. Eventually the man's sight improved enough to be able to see, albeit as if he needed extremely strong glasses, very out of focus, but enough that his wife said she had regained her husband, after being understandably depressed for the last eight years. He could see that she had on a white blouse, though wasn't sure if rosebuds or pink spots on it (they were rosebuds), he could also make out she was smiling at him. This man could have been left to think, along with his family, that it was 'hysterical' for the rest of his life if P.M's programme hadn't asked for volunteers. (After seeing this programme 11 or 12 years ago, I also trained as a hypnotherapist). As to Charcot, it now turns out there is a form of Epilepsy that we can now detect with modern technology, that Charcot just did not have the equipment for, so many of his 'hysterical' patients would almost certainly be properly diagnosed as genuinely epileptic today (I found this out while researching for my recent BSc in Psychology). I do wonder if Amanda had gone to an osteopath, whether she would have had more effective help for her back? Doctors barely study bone structure (so I'm told by doctor friends) whereas osteopaths do. A late friend was once firmly told she had ankylosing spondylitis and that it would gradually worsen. She was young with young children and naturally upset by this professional diagnosis. Luckily a friend recommended a good osteopath, and after a few sessions with him, she made a remarkable and 'magical' recovery from the ankylosing spondylitis, and rarely ever had backache again. M.E. patients have almost invariably had a virus before the M.E. often glandular fever, and yet are often still told their symptoms are psychosomatic? Just because we can't diagnose it yet, doesn't necessarily make it hysterical in my opinion.
Thank you for sharing, what a fantastic presentation :)
I loved this talk. I only wish that I could have heard it many years ago when I was a nurse in an Accident and Emergency department. I would have been a better nurse.
So good I watched twice.
"doctors expect that if we say to people your tests are normal we want you to tell us you are delighted and then go away" - stay classy doctor!
To believe absolutely in the power of current science to know everything is only possible with an arrogance that outweighs the desire to show enough kindness and understanding towards patients, some of whom will be suffering from diseases that medicine simply does not yet understand.
It is not the public that created or perpetuates the stigma, but psychiatry itself.
Psychiatry has never bothered to apoligise for a century of sexist bullshit - the concept of hysteria and everything that follows is inherently tainted by sexism and lack of science (there is no bio-psycho-social model that shows the physical symptoms of "conversion disorder", "somatisation" which continues the concept of hysteria through to today (see the DSM editions where hysteria was removed and these new names were substituted in place)
Likewise, the quality of science in psychology and psychiatry is of poor quality - questionable statistical methodology, poor quality experimental design are the norm and the result is the low rate of replication and treatments that don't work when measuring behaviour objectively, rather than merely on subjective questionnaires which are easily biased.
Psychiatrists and neurologists should stop complaining about stigma of both mental health conditions and unexplained conditions. Why? Because nothing will change until they start to do some high quality science investigating how the mind and body are linked in these cases - not to simply take the assumption that such conditions are psychological without any direct evidence.
I agree that there are many problems with how psychiatric research is done, but the problem with studying psychological phenomena is that they ARE highly subjective. For example, like she says, there's no way of measuring pain objectively. Much of psychology is about subjective experience, and we just can't measure subjective experience objectively. On top of that, there is still so much we don't know about the brain, so if we don't understand the brain, how are we supposed to study how the mind and body are linked reliably?
Actually, I think one of the most problematic aspects of current psychiatry research is how obsessed it is with trying to explain psychological phenomena as having biological origin. Yes, we often see correlations between psychology and the brain, but it's too early to assume causation. The neural activity is merely a reflection of what's happening psychologically, and only in cases where the brain was definitely affected by physiological factors can we assume that the brain change caused the psychological change. What can be done are two things: We can study what types of treatment are useful, which WILL be very subjective, and we can study the basics of how neural activity is linked to psychological processes so that we might improve research bit by bit. Both of these are done, and no, they're not perfect, but the quality of the research depends on what we are currently able to do. So have patience.
A symptom that cannot be explained by any medical test is obviously a function of the knowledge and technology available at that point in time. In 1960 Multiple Sclerosis couldn't be explained by any medical test and it was consequently diagnosed as imaginary. Then MRI was invented and Multiple Sclerosis was found to be a very expainable organic neuroimmune disease. So it will be for most of (all?) the other illnesses that are now still sillily thought to be imaginary. What is appalling is that medicine seems to never learn from past mistakes. So sad.
The doctor we all wish we had.
brilliant woman.
RTT HYPNOTHERAPY is rather efficient with these types of issues.
really nice 👍, I wish doctors ask patients about how do they feel and take their emotions and psychology in consideration:)
Wow.
I am sorry becase I don' understand English. I would like that traduction in Spanish
whaaaat´s no entiendo ni verga . esa tia sabe un monton sobre las emociones
Top 5 imaginary illnesses:
- depression
- anxiety
- ADHD
- allergy
- large labia minora