United Kingdom: Dr Suzanne O’Sullivan (BPS neurologist)

I hope she’s able to think on what label I have for her opinions masquerading as fact. It starts with g and has 8 letters. I’ve a special detector for this sort of thing.

 

Yes there is a video online helping to distinguish this type from an eejit.

 

Mr

Aternatively we explain away physical illness as difference or struggle.

 

Uh huh. Definitely wouldn't want to do that.

 

Oh, no, no no no. It goes both ways, as they love to say, but only in one direction. You see, it's the preferred direction, and therefore it's the correct one.

Although when you think of the absurd implications of her claims, and they are popular ones, not just hers, that up to 1/3 of chronic health problems are psychosomatic, and medicine has been growing into a fanatical obsession over this for the last few decades, how they hell is that supposed to be a success story?

And of course it isn't. The more they corrupt this with their ideology, the worse things will get, and in response the more they will point out how significant it is, how only they have the solution to this problem. A solution that clearly can't work given growing prevalence, but that's just something people should worry their pretty little heads with.

To me this is exactly like some ideologues who prefer to blame lack of faith for natural disasters, which conveniently happen to be getting worse over the last few decades. Because it is exactly the same thing for all intents and purposes.

 

Thinking of oneself as an artist probably says a lot about one’s own susceptibilities.

 

Saturday's Times "Weekend" supplement print edition 15 March 2025 (pp 32-33):

Weekend Essay

"Spotting disease early can save lives but medical advances have led to an epidemic of overdiagnosis - and this is doing more harm than good," writes Suzanne O'Sullivan

Autism, ADHD, early diagnosis of Parkinson's, blah, blah, blah...


Online:

https://www.thetimes.com/comment/co...-were-diagnosing-too-much-too-early-gr3xktpdm

Read and share anything on our site for free this weekend

WEEKEND ESSAY | SUZANNE O’SULLIVAN

Our new health crisis — we’re diagnosing too much, too early

Spotting disease early can save lives but advances in medicine have produced an epidemic of overdiagnosis — and in many cases this is doing more harm than good

[Image] Stock image of brain scan

Without a cure, an early diagnosis, via an MRI scan in this case, may only mean the patient has to live longer with Parkinson’s disease

[No paywall for this weekend]

 

Sorry - I don't know how to find the Archive link to articles -

https://www.thetimes.com/article/66389e62-e5a2-4959-8e7a-c0c3339f129a



Most Comments under this article agree with The Storyteller Suzanne O'Sullivan.


This Comment doesn't agree with her:

"Another plug for this dreadful person? From the paper which at least tried to address the Maeve O’Neill story with compassion and sensible judgement? Why on earth are you so keen on an implausible controversialist who has written her third book of psychosomaticising nonsense? Is it because of some vague editorial feeling that any medical condition not described by, say, Galen must be woke and snowflakey?"

.

 

I spotted this in my podcast feed today.

People I (mostly) admire: We're Not Getting Sicker - We're Overdiagnosed

Suzanne O’Sullivan is a neurologist who sees many patients with psychosomatic disorders. Their symptoms may be psychological in origin, but their pain is real and physical — and the way we practice medicine, she argues, is making those and other health problems worse.


Podcast and transcript:
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/were-not-getting-sicker-were-overdiagnosed/

quote on Long Covid from transcript:

LEVITT: So, I started this conversation by suggesting that I thought that this book would make people mad. Now I’m going to ask you about long Covid and see how many people with long Covid you can offend because you are a real skeptic with respect to long Covid. Is that true?

O’SULLIVAN: First thing I want to say is that there should be nothing offensive in my view at all here, because my position always with these disorders is that people are suffering. Symptoms are real, but it’s how people conceptualize what’s causing those symptoms that I think is a problem.

And it’s also the perception. So if I’m about to say that I believe long Covid for a lot of people is psychosomatic, that should not be seen as in any way lessening their suffering or saying that they are not suffering or saying that they do not need help. I’m merely saying that the mechanism of illness according to the evidence and according to my view, fits better with psychosomatic illness.

But with regard to long Covid, I mean, it came about in a very unconventional way. The term arose on the 20th of May, 2020, when it was tweeted by an Italian person who was suffering with long term symptoms after contracting Covid. It very quickly took off in social media.

There were people who were not hospitalized, who had a more mild form of Covid, who didn’t seem to be getting better quickly enough, and they banded together on social media under the hashtag long Covid, and found support in each other that way.

The difficulty was that long Covid then spread very quickly to the mainstream media into the mouths of government officials who were telling us every day not only could we die and we might end up in hospital, but even if we got a minor illness, we could get this thing called long Covid. But there was no definition for long Covid.

There was no specific symptoms that told you what it was. There was no test that proved what it was. So it was a name that could explain any type of suffering during the pandemic in those early stages. It quickly spread to medical journals. And that science just moved too quickly to be really accurate or meaningful.

And for some people, it was being referred to as long Covid, and for others, it was probably given different names. There’s a few pieces of evidence that really support the psychosomatic theory. More than one study has shown that loneliness was a predictor for long Covid. There was a study in Germany where they followed healthcare workers, and people who had an expectation of symptom severity were more likely to get long Covid. So people who expected to get it got it.

There was another study in which they showed that self diagnosis was more likely to lead to long Covid than an official diagnosis of Covid infection. Obviously people were suffering in the pandemic. They were suffering psychologically. Their diets changed. They stopped exercising. Everything about their body changed. And here was a diagnostic explanation for it.

So I really feel that long Covid drew in lots of people who were suffering in lots of different ways under this umbrella. But I really don’t think people should feel that means the suffering isn’t real. Again, it’s an intelligible way of asking for help at a time that you need help. And perhaps what we should learn from it is that we need better support systems for people that don’t rely upon a medical diagnosis.

 

She might want to start by considering if she’s also wrong. There’s plenty of bad info on LC out there, but that doesn’t make her right.

 

‘It fits better with my completely unevidenced, speculative, opportunistic, and philosophical view of humans.’

 

Picks out the few bits of evidence that sound as if they support her view (if you don't look at the quality of the evidence).
Exaggerates and misrepresents the implications of those bits.
Completely ignores the much greater quantity of evidence that shows her view to be incorrect.
Presents the resulting picture as "the evidence."

All very predictable, and the only question is whether on some level she's aware that she's being intellectually dishonest or whether she's simply not very good at critical thinking.

 

Another article in the I Paper

https://inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/20-somethings-20-diagnoses-overdiagnosis-3585705

 

The article says this:

I guess she didn’t get the note about how the psychosomatic medicine is the recent and final paradigm shift away from mind body dualism.

Again with the art thing. I’m so happy we have someone like her that can intuitively understand what’s wrong with everyone!

 

It is no accident that the media are platforming this ridiculous opinion at a time when the government is looking for justifications to cut not only disability support but special needs provision in schools.

 

It’s the approach of pretending that reality goes away or changes if we ignore it.

 

LC is spread by hashtag???
I'm seeing a neurologist this month, hopefully not a follower of O'Sullivan.
It's real, but we treat it psychologically. Would that work on SFN?
I had a letter that I would get an appointment in july/august and now a letter it's changed to march.
Handing out FND's at the gate to shrink the waitinglist?
All this does not put my mind at ease.

 

So you got worse again 3 months after the infection?

I’ve spoke to a few of people that reported the same. Some eventually recovered, others did not.