In the tradition of Oliver Sacks and Henry Marsh, award-winning neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan joins us for a moving and unforgettable scientific investigation with a very human face.

In Sweden, refugee children fall asleep for months and years at a time. In upstate New York, high school students develop contagious seizures. In the US Embassy in Cuba, employees complain of headaches and memory loss after hearing strange noises in the night.

These disparate cases are some of the most remarkable diagnostic mysteries of the twenty-first century, as both doctors and scientists have struggled to explain them within the boundaries of medical science and – more crucially – to treat them. What unites them is that they are all examples of a particular type of psychosomatic illness: medical disorders that are influenced as much by the idiosyncratic aspects of individual cultures as they are by human biology.

Inspired by a poignant encounter with the sleeping refugee children of Sweden, Wellcome Prize winning neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan traveled the world to visit other communities who have also been subject to outbreaks of so-called ‘mystery’ illnesses, attempting to unravel their complex meaning, while asking the question: who gets to define what is and what isn’t an illness?

In this livestream event, she joins us to share her answer.