We’re going to tweak the book-club schedule—thanks to @Steersman I realized that hardcover copies of Alex Byrne’s The Trouble with Gender book will not be out in the US until January. So we’re going to bump The Trouble with Gender to February. In mid or late January, we’ll meet to discuss Suzanne O’Sullivan’s Sleeping Beauties.
In Sweden, hundreds of refugee children fall into a state that resembles sleep for months or years at a time. In Le Roy, a town in upstate New York, teenage girls develop involuntary twitches and seizures that spread like a contagion. In the U.S. Embassy in Cuba, employees experience headaches and memory loss after hearing strange noises during the night. These are only a few of the many suspected culture-bound psychosomatic syndromes—specific sets of symptoms that exist in a particular culture or environment—that affect people throughout the world.
In The Sleeping Beauties, Dr. Suzanne O’Sullivan—an award-winning Irish neurologist—investigates psychosomatic disorders, traveling the world to visit communities suffering from these so-called mystery illnesses. From a derelict post-Soviet mining town in Kazakhstan to the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua to the heart of the María Mountains in Colombia, O’Sullivan records the remarkable stories of syndromes related to her by people from all walks of life. Riveting and often distressing, these case studies are recounted with compassion and humanity.
In examining the complexity of psychogenic illness, O’Sullivan has written a book of both fascination and serious concern as these syndromes continue to proliferate around the globe.
This sounds like an interesting book. I saw a Netflix Documentary on refugee kids who fell into a "coma" due to trauma, including horrible events surrounding their reasons for fleeing their home country as well as the threat of being thrown out of their new country. It seemed that, once they achieved permanent citizenship, they often would come out of the coma. These comas have sometimes lasted for years.
While psychosomatic illness is "real," and causes physical symptoms, there is a huge distinction between this and the social contagion of gender dysphoria, which has no physical symptoms. It's purely psychological. That this purely psychological illness - whether caused by social elements or spontaneously occurring due solely to internal mental processes - is then treated by society pushing dangerous physical treatments is a crime of epic proportions. Using cosmetic procedures to "cure" a psychological problem seems to me an absurdity.
Because I understand that there are some people who have had those cosmetic procedures and were/are happy with them, I would not make such procedures illegal, nor would I ever call for discrimination against anyone who has had such cosmetic procedures in any form. (Notably, a man on estrogen does not suffer "discrimination" by being told he must undress with other men or compete in sports with other men.)
However, these cosmetic procedures should be called what they are - purely cosmetic procedures for those who want to look like the opposite sex and/or simply want to look more masculine or more feminine in appearance. They should not be covered by Medicaid or private insurance, and they should never be sold as a medical treatment for a psychological disorder. It goes without saying that they should never pushed on minors or vulnerable young adults with mental comorbidities.
Psychosomatic disorders might sometimes warrant physical treatments (for example, a feeding tube for the refugee kids in comas) -to treat the physical symptoms. However, that has nothing to do with treating psychological disorders with chemicals and surgeries.
Sorry. I had to vent. I just read my law school's latest magazine and found they are promoting laws (as in Georgia) that require Medicaid to cover these treatments. It makes me so angry!
VERY excited about this one!