Dr. Suzanne O'Sullivan
speaker
271 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Dr. Suzanne O'Sullivan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I think the thing people don't want to say is what they think they do know, which is that perhaps it has a psychosomatic cause.
A lot easier to say you don't know than to say that. So I don't know what her doctors actually thought, but they said possibly a stroke. They did do lots of tests. It was a bit casual in saying they sent her away, but they did care for her. But shortly after, the nurse were affected. And as it spread, the symptoms changed. And that's kind of what happens with these things.
They spread from older people to children. And when it went to children, they started having different symptoms like hallucinations and things.
I mean, this town, I read about this in the newspaper and you should have seen the pictures of this town. Imagine the most depressing town in the middle of the Kazakhstani steppe, sort of dilapidated buildings. And all of the people were pictured beside rusty swing sets. Oh.
Astonishingly depressing. When the sleeping sickness happened, it was a big mystery for the country. The government did loads of investigations. They sent engineers and people to the town. It was a uranium mining town. So they thought maybe a toxin was coming from the uranium mine and really went into overdrive investigating this. But also loads of foreign journalists came.
So this town went from being a town of 300 people to being a town that was kind of awake with activity of all these people visiting it. So when I read about it, I just thought, well, I would fall asleep in that town. It looks terrible. I sort of assumed that this happened because it was such a depressing place to live.
Yeah, because the world is so small now.
Let me tell you the end of that story, because then I visited the town. So I'd seen how depressing it looked. And I thought, well, I'll go and interview the people and see if I can kind of understand this a little bit better. And I met the people who'd been in the sleeping sickness. And the first woman I met, lovely lady Tamara, beautiful, well into her 70s, but had kind of bleach blonde hair.
And she was really making an effort. She was lovely. And she basically was telling me that this town was paradise to live in. What? Yeah. It really was not paradise. It went down to something like minus 50 in the winter and they had no running water, most of them. The town had been dying slowly. They had no electricity.
I visited the hospital and there was a bath full of water where they could come and get a bucket of water if they needed it kind of thing. This town was not paradise. And I just thought, this is bizarre. But then the more people I met, the more I realized that I was not understanding the story, which was that this town, once upon a time... actually had been paradise for these people.
So basically it was a secret uranium mining town for the Russians during the Soviet era. These people came from Russia and they were basically mining families and they had been put on a bus one day in somewhere like Siberia and told you're going to Kazakhstan. They didn't have much choice in it and they got on this bus and they drove to Kazakhstan. I don't know how long that took.
They stopped in multiple bleak places and thought... oh God, I hope this isn't it. And eventually they came to this actual paradise town in Kazakhstan where they had built brand new apartment blocks. They had a brand new hospital. They had a facility for looking after the children. There was fruit and vegetables in the shop that nobody in the Soviet Union ever saw.
And the reason it was set up that way is because they wanted to keep this mining town secret. They wanted these people to stay in the town. They wanted these people to be happy. So I had thought that people were delusional when they said this town was paradise, but actually it had been.
Oh yeah. And then what happened was the Soviet Union broke up and the uranium mine shut down. And one by one, all these amazing facilities they had were lost. Most people left the town. There had been thousands living there, but this stalwart 300 stayed. And I think they stayed kind of thinking, this was once paradise. I raised my children here. This place means a lot to me.
They told me stories about having picnics by the riverside and it was all very beautiful. They thought that it would eventually go back to being paradise. But instead what was happening was it was just becoming more and more decrepit. What happened when you got the sleeping sickness, the only way to cure you was to leave the town. Yeah.
I think it was just a really phenomenally sophisticated way of making that really hard decision. In the end, I thought it was a kind of a love story for this town. You know, it meant so much to them and leaving it was so painful. Sometimes these psychosomatic disorders, we think of them as illnesses, but sometimes they are a way of our brains helping us through a problem.
There's survival mechanisms in some way.
dissociative seizures, very often they happen for the first time at a time of great stress. There's only so much you can handle and this is your brain protecting you from the thing you can't handle. Then it all goes a little bit around.
Absolutely.
Yeah, everything I write comes from the patients I care for. I'm in full-time NHS practice. I'm seeing patients every day and the patients I'm seeing have changed over the decades. A lot of my patients are very young. I will see people in their 20s and they're coming to see me now and they will have a list of 9, 10 different diagnoses.
Showing 141–160 of 271 · page 8 of 14
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