The Age of Diagnosis

O'Sullivan, a neurologist, builds her case around 'diagnosis creep': the way categories like autism, ADHD, long Covid, and certain cancers have quietly widened until people who'd once have been considered within normal range now get pulled into a disease framework, sometimes to their detriment rather than their relief. She's careful to work through named cases where a diagnosis clearly helped someone alongside cases where it seems to have manufactured or entrenched an identity around suffering, rather than picking a side and finding evidence for it. The obvious tension, which she doesn't fully resolve, is that her argument comes from inside a system where many patients' actual problem is the opposite: years on a waiting list, unable to get seen or diagnosed at all.