The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness by Wellcome Prize-winning neurologist Suzanne O'Sullivan explores the mass psychogenic illnesses that have gripped the world in recent times, starting with the resignation syndrome affecting refugee children in Sweden, from which the book derives its name. The book is a part travelogue, part confessional monologue and part apologue written in a high-literary fashion invoking Milton's lost paradise, the sleeping princess of Brothers Grimm, the witches of Salem and other allegorical stories. These not only serve to raise the artistic calibre of the writing but also bring home a vital point: mass behavioural epidemics transcend spatiotemporal boundaries.
Sleeping Beauties is a masterclass in creative non-fiction where O'Sullivan gives us vivid portraits of her patients, their families and her travel companions. As the book progresses O'Sullivan turns reflective, and as a true scientist, questions the validity of her own science. After her explorations into different societies and their approaches to psychological phenomena O'Sullivan asks the ultimate question: what, if any, is the culture-bound syndrome of the West? Or is Western society and Western medicine so perfect that it has none?
In answering this question, O'Sullivan produces the best chapter of the book titled ‘Normal behaviour’ and one that I believe all junior doctors, regardless of specialty, should read during their early clinical years.
She writes, ‘the more I reflect on it, the more the story seems to be universal, a story of lost love’; between medicine and empiricism, between cure and care, between do-no-harm and always-do-good. ‘The duende’, she writes, ‘comes and goes,’ – as indeed she rightly reflects that the science we swear by now will not be considered science in 50 years; although its practice, and its broader implications on societal evolution will cohere.
In my view Sleeping Beauties is a book that should have been written by a psychiatrist. However, failing that, psychiatrists should be reading it, especially those who hope to navigate the field of behavioural science in all its forms – from psychiatry to psychology to academic neuroscience – within the boundaries of Western medicine.
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