Mind & body

I'm not the brightest and persist in checking if things are HOT by touching them. Sometimes, anticipating merely warm I apply a finger and get surprised >!yarroo!< by how hot it is. It takes < ½sec to get the signal up-processed-down. But although I feel the pain, there is often no obvious damage to the skin. It's a bit like a small child who falls over, gets up and carries on unless s/he sees blood, in which case waaaaiiiill. Is it that my 'mind' is deciding nothing to see feel here don't bother with the blister?

I was recently reading two books by Irish neurologist Suzanne O'Sullivan: The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness [2021 Guardian] by Borrowbox earbook and The Age of Diagnosis: Sickness, Health and Why Medicine Has Gone Too Far [2025 Guardian] as a regular page-turner. Dr O'Sullivan is the new Oliver Sacks [whom prev] - an expert on the working of the brain who can tell a tale. Neither author writes much about the bump-and-grind [concussion, MS, epilepsy, dementia, stroke] of their clinical work but has picked and anonymized the oddities among the oddities encountered in their practice. 

My memory of Sacks is that telling the weird [The man who mistook his wife for a hat etc.] in some detail was sufficient to secure an advance from a publisher. O'Sullivan is more polemical and political and none the worse for that. 

My first para begins to address the Mind/Body problem famously addressed by Rená Descartes in his 1637 Discours de la Méthode . Descartes' soundbyte was Je pense, donc je suis or more impressively in Latin cogito ergo sum: he was sure only that his mind was credible and accepted that his body and its sensations might be illusory. So there's a lot to be done teasing out Who is in charge anyway? Can we think ourselves well? Are we defined by our disability? Does this really hurt?  O'Sullivan takes a different duality to task in both of her books: that no sick person exists in isolation. We are all embedded the seven circles of our social life: our family, our village, our county, our class, our country, our united states, our species. [Don't hold me to seven, I'm just making this up as a I go along.] All of these layers will influence our unconsidered certainties and sense of self. For e.g. I don't question the fact that my knees work and it took a conscious act of empathy [never my strongest suit] to walk at the pace of Pat the Salt's zimmer frame. I am better than some but still Other [transitive verb] folks who have facial hardware, better tans or drive white Hiace vans.

Here's one story from The Sleeping Beauties. Dr O'Sullivan was bizarred out to discover that there were ~170 cases of catatonia among teenage refugees in Sweden. In Sweden? why in Sweden and not Switzerland or other West European democracies. So she made some enquiries and contacts and went to visit some of these cases of resignation syndrome. Not to oversimplify a complex and disparate set of tragedies but the normal way of processing applications, and re-applications and appeals and re-appeals for asylum in Sweden involves the entire family. Not least because the kids are far better speaking Swedish than their Yazidi [or whatever] parents. The kids have been in school for several years as the mill of immigration rules grinds on. The Swedish system decides that Turkey is safe enough for such people and in parallel decides that this paperless family is probably Turkish and so asylum is refused. The kids go home, go to bed and go coma. Except it's not coma as neurologists normally see it; the data details [muscle tone, BP, pulse, MRI] are unique to teenage refugees in Sweden. They are none the less Real and super distressing for all concerned. There is little that a neurologist can do except order more tests. Physiotherapists are essential for ameliorating the symptoms [jaysus, not the bedsores - these kids have enough to suffer etc] but cannot manifest a cure. The cure is for Sweden to stamp the papers obestämd uppehållstillstånd = indefinite leave to remain. But De Man might have saved a lot of trouble by not including [fragile, impressionable] children in asylum hearings, judgments and appeals. And of course that has very uncomfortable geopolitical implications [aka floodgates] for the Swedish taxpayer and those whom they elect.

I like the cut of O'Sullivan's jib. You can get a sick note from work if you have an ADHD diagnosis and a prescription. But you can't if you just feel crap today. I dunno about hangovers being sick-notable. If we trusted employees to do their best and treated them like responsible adults then feeling crap would be good enough. Medicalizing the extremes tails of the normal range of human affect / health / happiness lays off all the solutions on MegaPharm to the glee of shareholders. Doctor's lists are long: the new normal is that each patient is allowed 7.5 minutes: just time to write a script but not enough to listen.

Good health requires good food; a warm winter home; a sense of community; maybe a bit of nookie. The dispossessed may have none of these essentials. But they have a medical card.  Maybe making The Minister responsible for supplying these needs is too wide a social circle to be relatable? People want to be heard as much as they want a square meal. See also Maslow's hierarchy of needs.