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

[richie]

I think we will not get far here esp as clinical matters are the subject.

 

[Deanne NZ]

When is someone going to write a book about how harmful it is for the very many people who ignore their symptoms and don’t seek timely medical care? I would expect that this is a proportion of the population that far exceeds the “worried well” that the BPS faction seem so keen to malign. The disproportionate publicity the BPS ideology gets in the media is so harmful.

 

[Nightsong]

David Black on O'Sullivan, the DWP, as well as some of the history (even mentions SW & the Woodstock conference):

O’Sullivan’s basic premise would seem to be that people aren’t so much ill, as imagining they are ill thanks to maladaptive cognitions which really shouldn’t be encouraged. This is of course music to the ears of Wes Streeting, Liz Kendall, and Rachel Reeves in their bid to cut down on the numbers of benefit claimants, though it must be extremely annoying, not to say terrifying, for those bedbound by post-viral brain fog, chronic pain, muscle weakness, and severe fatigue

https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2025/...nne-and-an-all-in-the-head-conspiracy-theory/

 

[MrMagoo]

Do these Drs realise that they’re exposing their own somewhat basic personal take on something they don’t even understand? Clearly not. This type of behaviour says a lot about them, more than it says about patients.

 

[Utsikt]

David Black on O'Sullivan, the DWP, as well as some of the history (even mentions SW & the Woodstock conference):

https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2025/...nne-and-an-all-in-the-head-conspiracy-theory/

It is, like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, and Post-Viral malaise, just another of those mystery medical illnesses which our medical authorities can’t explain, so not an illness at all, you see. The fact that thanks to the dominance of psychiatry’s biopsychosocial tendency UK medical schools have avoided teaching and researching these ‘unexplained illnesses’ for decades is apparently of little account.

 

[rvallee]

In 2008 Lord Layard, an economist, came up with the Improving Access to Psychological Therapies initiative (IAPT). A later NHS England report Investment in Mental Health; announced that the IAPT programme could ‘generate savings in excess of £300 million by March 2015 through reductions in healthcare usage and Exchequer savings through helping 75,000 people move off welfare benefits.’ It was anticipated that ‘by the end of 2016/17 a net financial benefit of £4640 million is expected as the provision and utilisation of accessible evidence-led therapies increases.’

That's quite an expensive, and impressive, scam they built up there. And the lesson seems to be: let's do it again!

This is the biopsychosocial in a nutshell: spend more money, for worse results, and more losses, all to achieve more suffering, and exactly as much benefits as opening a chain of astrological homeopathic clinics. Art of the deal!

Also, for an economist, this Freud dude sure sucks at economics.

 

[Utsikt]

Also, for an economist, this Freud dude sure sucks at economics.

The irony is that an economist would tell you to think of the long term costs instead of the next year or election cycle.

 

[SNT Gatchaman]

Response by a GP with Long Covid: Suzanne O’Sullivan’s new book ‘The Age of Diagnosis’ and her curious characterisation of Long Covid as a psychosomatic condition

 

[Dolphin]

https://www.irishtimes.com/health/y...old-adults-for-a-drug-that-is-in-short-supply

An Irish doctor on why she believes autism, ADHD and depression are being overdiagnosed


Overdiagnosis of conditions such as autism, ADHD and depression is a result of the relaxation of diagnostic criteria, argues consultant in neurology Suzanne O’Sullivan
[..]
You say that a psychosomatic explanation for people with long Covid has not featured nearly enough in public discourse. What do you mean by that?

I volunteered in intensive care during the pandemic. Anyone who ended up in intensive care and ended up on those machines, they would have lasting symptoms. You don’t get away scot-free from that. Obviously, there will be people who have a post-viral syndrome. The pandemic created the perfect storm for a psychosomatic epidemic. What do you need to develop psychosomatic symptoms?

Firstly, you need to be asked to pay worried, anxious attention to your bodies. Anybody working in medicine would expect that people would get psychosomatic symptoms during the pandemic.

Does long Covid exist in some people?

The term long Covid is not useful. Do hospitalised patients have persistent symptoms? One hundred per cent. That could be called long Covid because they have had organ damage, the consequences of being in intensive care causes physical change.

There will also be people with post-viral syndrome that causes chronic fatigue for six months or a year. That is well recognised after many viruses.


There will unequivocally be people with persistent post-viral fatigue and they will have long Covid.

...[Separately] people still think psychosomatic [means] that there is nothing wrong with you, you are imagining it, and that is why the conversation has been really stifled. It would be a different conversation if people understood that psychosomatic symptoms are as disabling as any other symptoms.


I assumed that if somebody had a psychosomatic illness, that there was nothing physically wrong with them, that it was all in their head?

No, there is something very physically wrong with them. The physical symptoms you get with psychosomatic disorders are real physical symptoms for starters. Just because they are psychosomatic does not mean they are less severe. That’s where the difficulties arise.

 

[Cinders66]

https://www.newstatesman.com/podcas...e-we-living-through-an-overdiagnosis-epidemic
Long section on Lyme disease in this one. It was really frustrating to see progressive left journalists without experience of being sick or being a doctor thinking it was so cool and edgy In challenging peoples illnesses and diagnosis and behaviour with no challenging at all of theis doctor’s claims or the UK medical set up for unexplained but disabling and life ruining illness.

 

[rvallee]

She doesn't even make sense. Her arguments are all over the place, a perfect empty putty vessel that can be molded to whatever wine someone wants in there.

What O'Sullivan says is as unhinged and harmful as what RFK Jr is doing. Which is mostly standard medical trope, but she is comfortably close to Wessely and his gang. This is a great way of confusing people and giving them valid reasons to distrust medicine. It's like horseshoe theory in politics, where the extremes tend to push for the same things, just with a different angle. It's just as much disinformation in the end.

 

[Nightsong]

"Trial By Error: Suzanne O’Sullivan’s “Psychosomatic” Mis-Diagnoses":

https://virology.ws/2025/04/10/trial-by-error-suzanne-osullivans-psychosomatic-mis-diagnoses/

 

[dave30th]

"Trial By Error: Suzanne O’Sullivan’s “Psychosomatic” Mis-Diagnoses":

Thanks. It seems she's never really met an illness she couldn't turn into a psychosomatic condition.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

Thanks. It seems she's never really met an illness she couldn't turn into a psychosomatic condition.

It wouldn't be surprising. Probably nobody would refer such people to a specialist in psychosomatics. I strongly suspect that I never saw patients with fibromyalgia as a rheumatologist because all the local medics knew that a colleague of mine specialised in 'biopsychosocial' problems like pain.

 

[Nightsong]

A few weeks ago I came across a conversation written up in a journal from several years ago that included O'Sullivan - she apparently became interested in "functional" disorders after taking her first consultant position where she found that 70% of the seizure patients investigated in her specialist unit who had videoed EEGs had pseudoseizures (and doesn't mention the obvious potential for referral bias). It's quite strange, as she has considerable insight into how limited current understanding of the brain actually is, but also quite easy to see where her line of thinking has gone wrong in this discussion - while she says her take isn't a Freudian one she's clearly been very much influenced by those ideas, even quoting from Freud & Breuer's Studies on Hysteria.

Link

Much of the discussion is not about FND but about the nature of consciousness itself.

 

[Friendswithme]

Bingo. This is the core of BPS - that beliefs about yourself can manifest symptoms.

Have you ever seen this? Kind of cool, right. And it shows beliefs can indeed bring about symptoms.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

Much of the discussion is not about FND but about the nature of consciousness itself.

That reveals a very strange take on consciousness indeed. One might even say an intellectual contortion designed to fit preconceptions. I am familiar with Hoffman's view, which is just a recognition of the adaptive representational nature of experience distorted by the spurious argument that there is something that the world is like that our experience is unlike. The seventeenth century people could see beyond that.

Sullivan, on the other hand invokes all sorts of pseudoneurological arguments that I don't think make any sense at all. She claims that people with dissociative seizures experience themselves as unconscious. I won't bore people with unpicking that but the interviewer seems suitably puzzled by such a proposal. I have no idea whether anyone else thinks the way she does but it has no scientific grounding.

 

[Trish]

Have you ever seen this? Kind of cool, right. And it shows beliefs can indeed bring about symptoms.

Sure they can, in some specific instances, but that says nothing about whether ME/CFS symptoms can be brought about by beliefs, nor that changing beliefs will reverse the symptoms of ME/CFS. It's irrelevant.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

Have you ever seen this? Kind of cool, right. And it shows beliefs can indeed bring about symptoms.

This is very familiar. I have spend many a happy hour discussing rubber hands with Tony Marcel. But it may be of interest because it is a clear case where we know how the rules have been broken. As Trish points out we have no reason to think it has any relevance to ME/CFS because in that instance we have no theory of how the rules might have been broken. Theories of normal stress responses won't hack it. We need a theory of responses due to specific breakages of the rules. All the standard psychology has to be assumed not to apply.

 

[Utsikt]

Have you ever seen this? Kind of cool, right. And it shows beliefs can indeed bring about symptoms.

Can beliefs bring about any symptoms for anyone?

And how do you know if the symptoms are not caused by something else than beliefs?

Edit: removed a double negative.