Suzanne O'Sullivan

Suzanne O'Sullivan is an Irish physician practising in Britain, specialising in neurology In addition to academic publications in her field, O'Sullivan is an author of award-winning non-fiction books,

Early life and education

O'Sullivan is from Dublin and studied medicine at Trinity College Dublin. She was the first in her family to attend college.

Career

O'Sullivan is a neurologist, The main focuses of her work in neurology are in the treatment of epilepsy patients, and on improving medical care for people with psychosomatic disorders.

Included in her scholarly publications is work on Functional Neurological Disorder (FND).

As of 2025, O'Sullivan had authored four non-fiction books, concerned with psychosomatic illness, epilepsy, and over-medicalisation in particular.

Awards and recognition

O'Sullivan's 2016 book, It's All in Your Head: True Stories of Imaginary Illness, was shortlisted for the Books Are My Bag Readers Awards—a bookshop-curated, reader-selected award—for the year of its publication, and in that year it won the £30,000 Wellcome Book Prize, and the Royal Society of Biology's General Book Prize, for "an accessible, engaging and informative life sciences book written for a non-specialist audience", as well. An early work unrelated to her professional writing, the travel piece, "Going Off the Grid on Indonesia’s Forgotten Islands" (published in The Telegraph ) won the Travel Writer of the Year Award, for longer form writing, from a trade group in 2018.

Her book, The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness, was shortlisted for the 2021 Royal Society Science Book Prize. The book also featured repeatedly in recommendations of the Next Big Idea Club throughout 2021 and 2022, and the organisation interviewed O'Sullivan regarding the book in its magazine in that period as well.

Popular works

Overview The following are the four first hardcover English editions of O'Sullivan's books: For the publication date, see this link.

It's All in Your Head: True Stories of Imaginary Illness (2015) This, Sullivan's first book, was published by Chatto & Windus in 2015, to positive reviews. is an account of how the study of epilepsy changed scientists’ understanding of the human brain. It explores modern views and treatments for epilepsy, and looks at what each teaches about how the brain functions. Among the characters Brainstorm presents are: Donal, who hallucinates cartoon dwarves; Maya, who faces possible radical surgery to address her epilepsy; Sharon, who experiences seizures who cause was other than diagnosed;

The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness (2021) This, O'Sullivan's third book, was published in April 2021 by Picador in England, and by Pantheon in the United States, and was lauded by The Royal Society and other organisations. In this book, O’Sullivan travels to visit communities globally that are said to be affected by mass hysteria and culture bound syndromes—ways that specific cultures express distress, troubled thoughts, etc. Among the characters Brainstorm presents are: schoolgirls in Colombia presenting with seizures, as an apparent contagious outbreak; Kazakhstani townspeople presenting with apparent sleeping sickness, again apparently contagious; the victims of sonic weapon attacks; indigenous Nicaraguans presenting with 'crazy sickness'; and a New York high school presenting with a Tourette's-like syndrome that is spreading.

The Age of Diagnosis Sickness, Health and Why Medicine Has Gone Too Far (2025)

This, O'Sullivan's fourth book, was published in March 2025 by Thesis-Penguin Random House in England, to positive early reviews.

Personal life

O’Sullivan lives in London.