Books worth a neurologist’s time.

No. 1 · Functional neurology

The Sleeping Beauties

Suzanne O’Sullivan · Picador, 2021 · shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize

In Sweden, children of asylum-seeking families stop eating, stop speaking and stop waking, sometimes for months, and recover only once their family’s future is settled. O’Sullivan, a neurologist, went to meet them, and then kept travelling: to every place where a whole community seemed to fall ill at once with something no scan could explain.

• Sweden. “Resignation syndrome”: withdrawn, unresponsive refugee children.
• Kazakhstan. Two small towns where residents fell into sudden episodes of sleep.
• Nicaragua. Grisi siknis among Miskito young people: collapse, agitation, visions.
• Colombia, Guyana and New York State. Outbreaks of fainting and convulsions in schools.
• Havana. The diplomats’ “Havana syndrome”, and how quickly a single explanation took hold.

Her argument is the one every neurologist needs and few can put so clearly: these illnesses are real and disabling, they are not faked, and their cause often lies less inside one brain than in the family, the culture and the pressures around it. A diagnosis is a story the community tells about suffering, and the wrong story can keep people ill.

Why it is on this list

Functional neurological disorder fills our clinics, yet we still too often explain it badly or not at all. This book makes a strong case for taking the social history as seriously as the MRI, and for choosing words that help a patient recover rather than words that fix the illness in place. Worth reading before your next “normal” EEG in a patient who is plainly unwell.