The Washington Post: How American health care has been failing women for centuries (review of a book written by Jennifer Lunden)

Reading the opening chapter of Jennifer Lunden’s “American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life,” I recognized myself: a college student beset with debilitating fatigue and diagnosed with mononucleosis that was supposed to resolve in a couple of weeks but didn’t. My illness got a name, chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), in 1988 just as I graduated college a year late. Lunden fell ill with the same condition, myalgic encephalomyelitis, the following year. Though diagnosed and named, this illness and its symptoms, along with a host of enigmatic disorders that disproportionately afflict women, were often dismissed as depression and laziness.

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Along with the book’s rigorous cultural critique, Lunden draws from on her own experience with CFS, including the range of treatments she has tried with varying success. Diet, hyperbaric oxygen, functional medicine that “takes a holistic approach to the complexity and interconnectedness of biological systems,” and GoFundMe (because of her medical costs) all play important roles in her recovery and the book’s scrutiny of health-care systems and practices. She describes a type of brain re-training as especially effective for her that seemed reminiscent of physical therapy for balance that I have done to treat vertigo. The interplay between the author’s efforts with her own ailments and the chronicling of our nation’s shortcomings delivers the cumulative power of this book.​

Full article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/05/02/american-breakdown-review-jennifer-lunden/

 

CentralMaine.com: "Gripped by a mysterious illness, a Mainer finds an unexpected kindred soul"
By Frank O Smith

"'American Breakdown' is the true story of Mainer Jennifer Lunden’s quest to get medical help for a mysterious, debilitating illness. It is more than just a dark, absorbing 27-year ordeal. Tragically, Lunden chronicles the medical industry’s failure to take her complaints seriously, dismissing her as a hypochondriac, and worse: A “legion of doctors and specialists” told her she was suffering from 'hysteria.'"

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"Five years into her illness, suffering from depression and considering suicide, Lunden ran across Jean Strouse’s 'Alice James: A Biography.' James, the younger sister of writer Henry James and 'Father of American Psychology' William James, also suffered depression and considered suicide. 'I’d heard of Alice James; we had something in common. We’d both been felled by a mysterious fatigue.'

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"Her own struggle was intensified by an overwhelming sensitivity to chemicals and perfumes. Air fresheners, she discovered, emit over a hundred chemicals, including volatile organic compounds like formaldehyde and benzene, both known carcinogens. The artificial perfume industry in the late 1800s when Alice James was living and suffering was built on poisons. So, too, a whole new spectrum of dyes that went into everything from wallpaper, to carpets, to clothing, starting in the 1850s. Benzene, a byproduct of coal tar, produced dazzling purple and green and yellow dyes. As late as a 2021 study, the substance was found in 78 popular sunscreens."

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"Reading Joseph Campbell and studying George Lucas’ 'Star Wars' inspired Lunden to conceptualize her struggles as a hero’s journey. 'I began to think of my illness as a Call to Adventure.' Lunden spent eight years researching and writing about what she learned; “American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life” contains 75 pages of footnotes. In it, she relates Alice James’ tragic story, and she recounts how she saved herself."

 

Alice James was indeed a fascinating individual - one of the three or four 19th century diarists who wrote about the illnesses by which they were profoundly affected. Having read her diary and Strouse's biography I very much doubt that Alice had ME. Unfortunately, Strouse's biography of her - well, here's a quote that captures the tenor of it: