Book Review: "The Sleeping Beauties" by Suzanne O'Sullivan

I remember when I was at school and university and first started to read the books of Oliver Sachs. I was amazed to see what people were afflicted with and yet, how they managed to still keep in touch with themselves and try their best not to isolate themselves or lose hope. His writings were often narratives with emotional outpourings and stories which resonate with the empathy that one human being has towards another. I cannot say that this is exactly the same type of book but it follows the same guidelines of medical narratives and explorations in science. This book entitled "The Sleeping Beauties" traces one of our more modern ideas concerning health and wellbeing and that is psychological health. The health of the mind in times of chronic stress and/or trauma, the theories surrounding something called 'resignation syndrome' and the way in which the people around the suffering person become confused, riddled and often helpless when having to care for the person with the condition.

When I first heard about this particular books though, I was surprised by the reviews that were mostly average in the way that they spoke of the text. I finally got to read it for myself and had a slightly different view that this book is, in fact, extremely useful. It starts off in Sweden looking at two immigrant girls who are afflicted with a sleep disorder and have not woken up for some months. They seem to respond to external stimuli via their heart rate increasing etc. but there is no movement and no verbal or physical response. There is also no reason for them to be in this state and the author puts it down to something called ‘resignation syndrome’ in which chronic stress has literally caused the body to ‘give up’ but the mind and organs keep on going. Death whilst being alive. She then looks at two teenagers who have been continuously asleep for a few years and sees exactly what is going on with them with the help of the family doctor. After this, we get various afflictions such as a 10K runner who ends up in a wheelchair but according to doctors has suffered no physical damage whatsoever - purely chronic stress and one woman who almost died from a strange heart condition after living perfectly healthy for the vast majority of her life.

The book is well written, split up into various sections in which we get to have a look at the body’s different responses to extremely stressful situations. I think the one that scared me the most was the one about sleeping for ages and ages and even years because I am actually a person who functions of around 3-4 hours of sleep a night. Sleeping like that scares the hell out of me.

One thing I did enjoy about this book is that it really opens your eyes on to how the psychological state, if progressively getting worse to the point of no return, can actually cause very severe physical afflictions to the point of death. When these people physically recover though, there is monitoring on their body but nobody has really researched whether their minds have recovered and the author takes the reader aside to point this out. It is as if everyone seems to ignore the psychological problems of someone due to the fact that you cannot physically see it and therefore, it does not warrant the same treatment. From phenomenons where people lay down and simply died because they felt like it, to war-ravaged zones that could cause the trauma involved. There is more that just psychology here. There is more than simply it being ‘in your head’. This is a worldwide, widespread and hushed up problem.