It's All in Your Head: True Stories of Imaginary Illness

It's All in Your Head: True Stories of Imaginary Illness

Author	Suzanne O'Sullivan
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Subject	Health psychology, Pathological psychology
Genre	Medical
Publisher	Chatto & Windus
Publication date	2015
Media type	print & digital
Pages	336
ISBN	978-0701189266

It's All in Your Head: True Stories of Imaginary Illness is a non-fiction book by British neurologist Suzanne O'Sullivan. In it she describes several case studies of patients she diagnosed with psychosomatic illnesses, and argues for psychosomatic disorders to be taken more seriously by the medical profession. Controversially, she includes a chapter about a patient with ME/CFS who she diagnosed as suffering from a psychosomatic disorder.

Publisher's synopsis

(This synopsis was provided by the publisher for promotional purposes. For book reviews, please see Links section below.)

"Even if medical tests cannot explain your pain or tiredness or disability, it does not lessen your suffering. The pain of medically unexplained illness is every bit as real as any other and, if anything, is multiplied by the lack of understanding."

Most of us accept the way our heart flutters when we set eyes on the one we secretly admire, or the sweat on our brow as we start the presentation we do not want to give. But few of us are fully aware of how dramatic our body’s reactions to emotions can sometimes be.

Take Pauline, who first became ill when she was fifteen. What seemed at first to be a urinary infection became joint pain, then food intolerances, then life-threatening appendicitis. And then one day, after a routine operation, Pauline lost all the strength in her legs. Shortly after that her convulsions started. But Pauline’s tests are normal; her symptoms seem to have no physical cause whatsoever.

Pauline may be an extreme case, but she is by no means alone. As many as a third of men and women visiting their GP have symptoms that are medically unexplained. In most, an emotional root is suspected and yet, when it comes to a diagnosis, this is the very last thing we want to hear, and the last thing doctors want to say.

In It’s All in Your Head consultant neurologist Dr Suzanne O’Sullivan takes us on a journey through the very real world of psychosomatic illness. She takes us from the extreme -- from paralysis, seizures and blindness -- to more everyday problems such as tiredness and pain. Meeting her patients, she encourages us to look deep inside the human condition. There we find the secrets we are all capable of keeping from ourselves, and our age-old failure to credit the intimate and extraordinary connection between mind and body.

Links

• It's All in Your Head - Amazon (UK)
• It's All in Your Head - Amazon (US)
• It's All in Your Head - Goodreads

References

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somatic symptom disorder A psychiatric term to describe an alleged condition whereby a person's thoughts somehow cause physical symptoms. The actual existence of such a condition is highly controversial, due to a lack of scientific evidence. It is related to other psychiatric terms, such as "psychosomatic", "neurasthenia", and "hysteria". Older terms include "somatization", "somatoform disorder", and "conversion disorder". Such terms refer to a scientifically-unsupported theory that claims that a wide range of physical symptoms can be created by the human mind, a theory which has been criticized as "mind over matter" parapsychology, a pseudoscience.

See somatic symptom disorder.