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

Dolphin said:
Irish Independent:
https://www.independent.ie/entertai...-the-dangers-of-overdiagnosis/a586398049.html
https://archive.is/spXmx

‘ADHD is a business as well as a medical disorder’: Irish doctor on the dangers of overdiagnosis

Dr Suzanne O’Sullivan examines the rise in recorded cases of autism, ADHD and long Covid, and how labels can bring new problems

People with symptoms of long Covid at a US Congressional hearing in 2023. Dr O'Sullivan thinks the condition is "problematic". Photo: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
[..]
It’s all part of the quest to find a “biological cause of human distress”, O’Sullivan says, acknowledging that the pathologising of mental health problems and behavioural disorders is a trend right now, both within medicine and society. “Diagnosis is subjective, a true art,” she writes, “and that makes it susceptible to mistakes, exploitation and social pressure.”

A glaring example is that of long Covid, a diagnosis that has been driven by the patient community. Efforts to explain long Covid as a consequence of viral pathology have all fallen short and the non-specific nature of its long list of associated symptoms clouds the picture even further. It is clear O’Sullivan thinks the condition is “problematic”, pointing out that one support group included “loneliness”, “feeling scared” and “skin ageing” on its symptoms list.

Dr Suzanne O’Sullivan: ‘We need to be more thoughtful before accepting labels that could lower our expectations for ourselves’
The evidence that a significant proportion of long Covid is psychosomatic in cause has built slowly, writes the expert in psychosomatic disorders. Here, she is saying the quiet part out loud, and one gets the sense she would be far more forthright with a more select audience.
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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.
 
Jonathan Edwards said:
The poor lady seems very confused. How could unconsciousness be psychologically driven if the mind is turned off (unconscious). She doesn't mean unconscious. I suspect she doesn't really know what she means. (Sorry to be so controversial.;))
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Mr
Dolphin said:
From the Sunday Independent on March 9:

https://www.independent.ie/life/hea...struggles-as-medical-problems/a622135327.html

Without paywall:
https://archive.is/KJJYS#selection-4119.0-4527.137

Home / Life / Health & Wellbeing / Health Features

Neurologist Dr Suzanne O’Sullivan: ‘We are a perfectionist society, we explain away differences or struggles as medical problems’
‘Diagnosis creep’ is pushing people towards ‘illness identities’
--
"Overdiagnosis is the subject of O’Sullivan’s new book, which takes an urgent yet empathic look at Huntingdon’s disease, Lyme disease, long Covid, autism, the cancer gene, ADHD, depression, neurodiversity and something called Swan (syndrome with no name), and how the change in culture around these conditions can impact individuals through overdiagnosis."
[..]
"Labels matter. She explains how psychosomatic illnesses, in which she includes long Covid, are not all in the mind. They may originate in the mind, but their physical symptoms are manifestly real."
--

“I’m meeting people like Darcie every week,” O’Sullivan says, adding how people with psychosomatic illnesses “represent about a third of people attending specialty clinics – cardiology, respiratory, dermatology, neurology, gynaecology. That’s how common it is, yet people don’t seem to understand how serious a problem it can be.
Click to expand...

Aternatively we explain away physical illness as difference or struggle.
 
richie said:
Aternatively we explain away physical illness as difference or struggle.
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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.
 
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]
 
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Dx Revision Watch said:
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...

Will try and find a link later today.
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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.
 
Kalliope said:
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.
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‘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.
 
Theresa said:
Another article in the I Paper

https://inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/20-somethings-20-diagnoses-overdiagnosis-3585705
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The article says this:
Overdiagnosis occurs when people are turned into patients by identifying problems that, if left undiagnosed, likely wouldn’t have caused harm. It’s a “better safe than sorry” approach that pathologises normal life.

It is a reason given for the apparently sudden ubiquity of conditions like ADHD, autism, chronic Lyme disease, hypermobile EDS, and PoTS. Over diagnosis may also be connected to the rise in preventative screening for cancer and dementia.
Click to expand...
For conditions involving bodily hyper-awareness, like long Covid, diagnosis can worsen symptoms. The more you focus on your body, the more you notice irregularities you’d otherwise ignore – a knee ache, fatigue. This creates a feedback loop where your brain anticipates and sustains symptoms.

This is a psychosomatic condition – a real, debilitating illness without a biological cause. “When I say long Covid is partly psychosomatic, I’m not dismissing suffering. Some of the sickest patients I see have psychosomatic conditions.

The difficulty we have is that psychosomatic illness is still so stigmatised. In putting these theories forward, I’m advocating that we take these problems more seriously and give them more respect.” Because psychosomatic illnesses are mental rather than biological, traditional medical care can reinforce rather than alleviate symptoms. They require careful therapeutic approaches instead.
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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.
On an individual level, she urges people not to rush into diagnosis or view it as definitive. “There’s enormous subjectivity in diagnosis, even with advanced technology. Medicine is an art, and the most important part is listening to the story, not just relying on tests.”

“If a diagnosis doesn’t come with a treatment that’s going to treat and cure you but rather turns you into a patient who focuses on their symptoms, perhaps it’s something you can do without. I really want people to know that these uncertainties exist so they can decide for themselves if the label that they’ve taken on is definitely helping them or could be holding them back.”
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Again with the art thing. I’m so happy we have someone like her that can intuitively understand what’s wrong with everyone!
 
Overdiagnosis occurs when people are turned into patients by identifying problems that, if left undiagnosed, likely wouldn’t have caused harm. It’s a “better safe than sorry” approach that pathologises normal life.

It is a reason given for the apparently sudden ubiquity of conditions like ADHD, autism[...]
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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.
 
LC is spread by hashtag???:banghead::banghead::banghead::banghead::banghead::banghead::banghead::banghead::banghead::banghead:
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.
 
Sullivan said:
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.
Click to expand...

So what about those of us who weren't suffering psychologically? I (presumably) got Covid in Aug/Sep 2020 in a year in which my country had large periods of zero community transmission. The expectation was that it was rare to be exposed to Covid even in a hospital setting, and once vaccines were available we'd pretty much all be safe from severe disease. No-one in healthcare (at least in hospitals) was considering or discussing the risk of postacute chronic illness. I think I was only vaguely aware of the term 'Long Covid' and certainly hadn't equated it with ME.

My diet did not change. I continued to exercise fully. For short periods of lockdown the gyms were closed, but we did things at home and the cycle lanes were expanded to include the roads. I remember enjoying my 10 km work cycle commutes, now weaving across both lanes of an otherwise deserted waterfront road. As below in glorious sunshine, but without even the two cars.

istockphoto-490778766-612x612.jpg

Nothing about my body changed. Until a few months further down the line, when I thought everything was 100%, completely normal and status quo, but ostensibly out of the blue everything about my body did change.
 
SNT Gatchaman said:
Nothing about my body changed. Until a few months further down the line, when I thought everything was 100%, completely normal and status quo, but ostensibly out of the blue everything about my body did change.
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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.
 
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