Alan Levinovitz

Well, so I've learned from people selectively editing clips of interviews like these that I need to work on the subtitle, which as you know, headlines and book titles are chosen in collaboration with other people, editors and agents.

I'm working on a book called Demons by Another Name.

And the subtitle used to be Biology, Belief, and the Stories that Make Us Sick.

And that is a very catchy subtitle, but Make Us Sick...

makes it sound as if the stories themselves are the cause of the suffering, which is actually not true.

It can be in some cases, but it is not always.

And so I would like to change that to demons by another name, biology, belief, and the stories that shape our suffering.

I think that's a better way to think about it.

And what that book is gonna go into is a variety of different examples of how cultural or personal perspectives

on what is causing one's physical and mental suffering end up shaping that suffering through feedback loops.

And I call it Demons by Another Name because in other cultural contexts, people have had different names for these forces.

They call them demons.

They call it witchcraft.

They call it, well, in our culture, we call it stress or loneliness.

These are forces that are not physical forces, but have, that harm us.

And then our belief about what causes our own suffering in relation to these forces and the cultural context we're in shapes our suffering.

So if you imagine suffering

in certain ways as a kind of, I don't know, like a substance that takes shape in a particular culture.

Not all diseases are like this, obviously, not all illness is like this, but in many cases, the stories that we swim in that are invisible to us sometimes, that are built into our language itself,

give shape to our suffering.