It's All in Your Head
Stories from the Frontline of Psychosomatic Illness
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Vintage Publishing
Published:14th Apr '16
Should be back in stock very soon
A neurologist explores the very real world of psychosomatic illness
What happens when the symptoms are real, but the tests say nothing is wrong?
Neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan enters the difficult territory of psychosomatic illness, where patients can experience disabling physical symptoms without the structural disease or damage they and their doctors expect to find. Through extraordinary clinical cases, she explores dissociative seizures, functional neurological symptoms and other perplexing conditions, while showing why a psychosomatic diagnosis must never become an excuse for careless diagnosis or dismissal.
Moving between patient stories, neurological investigation and the history of medicine, O’Sullivan challenges the stubborn division between mind and body. She asks why psychosomatic illness carries such stigma, how doctors arrive at the right diagnosis and why patients so often experience a psychological explanation as an accusation.
For readers interested in medicine, psychology and the mysteries of human experience, It’s All in Your Head makes a compassionate case for taking these conditions seriously.
‘A fascinating glimpse into the human condition… a forceful call for society to be more open about such suffering’ Daily Mail
‘Honest, fascinating and necessary’ The Times
Doctors' tales of their patients' weirder afflictions have been popular since Oliver Sacks... Few of them, however, are as bizarre or unsettling, as those described in this extraordinary and extraordinarily compassionate book -- James McConnachie * Sunday Times *
A fascinating glimpse into the human condition... a forceful call for society to be more open about such suffering -- Ian Birrell * Daily Mail *
An important study of psychosomatic illness, which shows it to be a serious disease of modern society: misunderstood, misdiagnosed and surrounded by fear -- Louise Carpenter * Telegraph *
Remarkable Book… Offer[s] a remarkable insight into the suffering of these patients, as well as the power of the mind over the body… It should be on the reading list of every medical student. -- PD Smith * Guardian *
A book to start a revolution in healthcare, to make use see what no one has seen so clearly before -- Helen Rumbelow * Times *
Honest, fascinating and necessary -- David Aaronovitch * The Times *
An extraordinary book... an important one too -- Kathryn Hughes, 5 stars * Mail on Sunday *
This vital, engaging book... holds its own with recent bestsellers Do No Harm, the memoir of a neurosurgeon, and The Examined Life, by psychiatrist Stephen Grosz -- Hermione Eyre * Newsweek *
It's All in Your Head sits companionably beside Stephen Grosz's The Examined Life... it casts sympathetic light on debilitating conditions that are often medically and socially vilified -- Kate Colquhoun * Sunday Express *
A doctor's intriguing look at the puzzling world of psychosomatic illness * Sunday Times *
- Winner of Wellcome Book Prize 2016 (UK)
- Winner of Royal Society of Biology Book Award 2016 (UK)
ISBN: 9780099597858
Dimensions: 198mm x 129mm x 23mm
Weight: 236g
336 pages