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Suzanne O’Sullivan’s  It’s All in Your Head
‘New insights into the relationship between the body and the mind’ … Suzanne O’Sullivan’s It’s All in Your Head was the judges’ unanimous choice. Photograph: Alamy
‘New insights into the relationship between the body and the mind’ … Suzanne O’Sullivan’s It’s All in Your Head was the judges’ unanimous choice. Photograph: Alamy

Wellcome book prize goes to psychosomatic illness study

This article is more than 7 years old

Neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan’s It’s All in Your Head wins the £30,000 award for ‘thoughtful, humane and heartfelt’ study

Neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan’s exploration of psychosomatic illness, It’s All in Your Head, has won the £30,000 Wellcome book prize, praised by judges for offering “new insights into the relationship between the body and the mind”.

The annual award is for a book that best engages with “an aspect of medicine, health or illness”. O’Sullivan’s book, her debut, relates her own encounters with patients who have debilitating but medically unexplained illnesses. It was up against novels from Sarah Moss and Alex Pheby, memoirs by Cathy Rentzenbrink and Amy Liptrot, and Steve Silberman’s investigation into autism, Neurotribes.

Announcing O’Sullivan’s win, author and chair of judges Joan Bakewell called It’s All in Your Head a “truly impressive book”, which she and her fellow judges, the author and professor of cancer biology Frances Balkwill, and the writers Damian Barr, Tessa Hadley and Sathnam Sanghera, chose “unanimously … for its many virtues”.

“Suzanne O’Sullivan is a consultant neurologist and her first-hand accounts of diagnosing her patients offer new insights into the relationship between the body and the mind,” said Bakewell. “The fact that society divides them into two medical disciplines – the physical and the mental – is being increasingly challenged. O’Sullivan’s book brings to light important examples of how the two interrelate.”

The book combines O’Sullivan’s own story – she has been a neurology consultant since 2004 and currently works at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery – with case studies of her own patients to look at how deeply the body is affected by the mind. Looking at symptoms from palpitations to blindness and seizures, she argues that “psychosomatic disorders are physical symptoms that mask emotional distress”.

“She’s pushing at that whole business of where the mind and body interrelate – she’s pushing it forwards,” said Bakewell. “She says the body responds to emotions – we cry, for example, over something sad. And so of course the body responds to other kinds of distress … She says that sometimes people who are told they have a psychosomatic illness think they are to blame, and she says it’s not correct to have that view. She makes it absolutely uncomplicated, with a very easy and relaxed style … it’s very clear. And that’s hard to do. She’s devoted to her patients and that tenderness comes through too. She’s admirable.”

The Wellcome Collection’s head of public programmes James Peto called O’Sullivan’s book “a thoughtful, humane and heartfelt plea for a deeper and more widespread understanding of the intensely debilitating conditions she describes.

“An honest and revealing exploration of an area of healthcare where there is still much that is not yet known, this book reminds us forcibly of the complexities of the relationship between mind and body, and that the practice of medicine necessarily remains an art as well as a science.”

Previous winners of the Wellcome prize include Marion Coutts’s memoir about her husband’s death from a brain tumour, The Iceberg, and Rebecca Skloot’s biography The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

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