The Label That Sticks
There is a particular kind of courage required to walk into a room full of people who have organized their identities around a medical word and say: what if the word is doing you harm? Dr. Suzanne O'Sullivan does this not with the cold detachment of a debunker but with the quiet insistence of someone who has watched young women seize a hundred times a day and been told to discharge them because the brain scans are clean. This conversation is, at its core, about the hunger for narrative. We are meaning-making creatures trapped in bodies that malfunction in ways that don't always have clean causes, and the diagnosis — the label — is how we make the malfunction legible to ourselves and to others. It is how we enter a community, earn sympathy, get a chair at the table. O'Sullivan's provocation is not that suffering isn't real. It is that the story we tell about suffering can itself become a pathology. The sleeping women in Kazakhstan were not faking. The girls in Colombia were not performing. The embassy workers in Havana were not lying. They were all, in their own ways, doing what humans have always done: translating unbearable internal pressure into a language the body speaks when words run out. What is new — what O'Sullivan's new book diagnoses — is that social media has made contagion instantaneous and global, that the DSM keeps expanding its borders, that pharmaceutical companies and insurers and anxious parents all have structural incentives to find more sick people, and that we have somehow convinced ourselves that identifying a pathology is the same as solving one. Dax, who has spent sixteen years in a fellowship of people who name their disease so they can fight it, understands this tension more viscerally than most. He keeps reaching for the AA analogy: the moment in a meeting when someone mistakes their humanity for their addiction. Monica, who has epilepsy and who is half-terrified to hear that maybe she doesn't, sits in the exquisite discomfort of someone whose diagnosis is simultaneously a relief, an identity, and a question mark. The conversation never resolves. It isn't supposed to. To hold two conflicting ideas in the head at the same time is, as Dax announces at the top, a sign of intelligence. The real portrait here is of a species that is sick with the need to know what is wrong with itself — and occasionally sicker for having found out.