
The Age of Diagnosis
How Our Obsession with Medical Labels Is Making Us Sicker
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Narrated by:
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Suzanne O'Sullivan
About this listen
From a neurologist and the award-winning author of The Sleeping Beauties, a meticulous and compassionate exploration of how our culture of medical diagnosis can harm, rather than help, patients.
We live in an age of diagnosis. Conditions like ADHD and autism are on the rapid rise, while new categories like long Covid are being created. Medical terms are increasingly used to describe ordinary human experiences, and the advance of sophisticated genetic sequencing techniques means that even the healthiest of us may soon be screened for potential abnormalities. More people are labeled "sick" than ever before—but are these diagnoses improving their lives?
With scientific authority and compassionate storytelling, neurologist Suzanne O'Sullivan argues that our obsession with diagnosis is harming more than helping. It is natural when we are suffering to want a clear label, understanding, and, of course, treatment. But our current approach to diagnosis too often pathologizes difference, increases our anxiety, and changes our experience of our bodies for the worse.
Through the moving stories of real people, O'Sullivan compares the impact of a medical label to the pain of not knowing. She explains the way the boundaries of a diagnosis can blur over time. Most importantly, she calls for us to find new and better vocabularies for suffering and to find ways to support people without medicalizing them.
©2025 Suzanne O'Sullivan (P)2025 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“With grace, elegance, and compassion, The Age of Diagnosis slices through the confusion and the contradictions that have tied me in knots—both as a parent and as a clinician. Dr. O’Sullivan’s previous books made a big impression on me and influenced my clinical practice. This will do the same and more.”—Chris van Tulleken, author of Ultra-Processed People
“O’Sullivan explodes conventional wisdom about medical diagnoses. With clarity of prose and reasoning, The Age of Diagnosis should make all of us think about whether we are more or less healthy when we receive a diagnostic label.”—Elizabeth Loftus, distinguished professor, University of California, Irvine
“A brave and deeply empathetic book with a very important message.”—Henry Marsh, author of Do No Harm
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Story
You can tell what a society values by who it labels as a genius. You can also tell who it excludes, who it enables, and what it is prepared to tolerate. In The Genius Myth, Helen Lewis unearths how this one word has shaped (and distorted) our ideas of success and achievement. Ultimately, argues Lewis, the modern idea of genius—a single preternaturally gifted individual, usually white and male, exempt from social niceties and sometimes even the law—has run its course.
By: Helen Lewis
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The Social Genome
- The New Science of Nature and Nurture
- By: Dalton Conley
- Narrated by: Christopher Douyard
- Length: 8 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Sociogenomics brings together advances in molecular genetics and traditional social and behavioral science. The key tool is the polygenic index, which allows us to analyze DNA to measure a child's genetic potential. Today, we can estimate a child's adult height, how far they will go in school, and their weight as an adult—all from a cheek swab, finger prick, or vial of saliva. Dalton Conley and other researchers are using this new science to shed light on the ways in which genes shape our world, influencing how each person both creates and responds to the environment around them.
By: Dalton Conley
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Conflict Resilience
- Negotiating Disagreement Without Giving Up or Giving In
- By: Robert Bordone, Joel Salinas
- Narrated by: Chris Brinkley
- Length: 13 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Two former Harvard faculty—one an internationally-recognized negotiator and conflict management expert from Harvard Law, the other a leading behavioral neurologist and cutting-edge scientist from Harvard Med—join forces to introduce conflict resilience: the radical act of sitting in and growing from conflict to break the bad habits that sabotage our politics, workplaces, and most important relationships.
By: Robert Bordone, and others
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Memory Lane
- The Perfectly Imperfect Ways We Remember
- By: Gillian Murphy, Ciara Greene
- Narrated by: Emily Schwing
- Length: 6 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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We tend to think of our memories as impressions of the past that remain fully intact, preserved somewhere inside our brains. In fact, we construct and reconstruct our memories every time we attempt to recall them. Memory Lane introduces listeners to the cutting-edge science of human memory, revealing how our recollections of the past are constantly adapting and changing, and why a faulty memory isn't always a bad thing.
By: Gillian Murphy, and others
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The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto
- A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto
- By: Benjamin Wallace
- Narrated by: Benjamin Wallace
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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In October 2008, someone going by the name Satoshi Nakamoto posted a white paper outlining “a peer-to-peer electronic cash system” called Bitcoin to an arcane listserv populated by Cypherpunks. No one in the community had heard of Nakamoto, and just as people were starting to wonder who he was, he vanished. As the years passed, and the scope of Nakamoto’s achievement became clear, the truth of his identity grew into the greatest unsolved mystery of our time. The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto traces Benjamin Wallace’s attempt to unmask the figure behind the currency and the world it wrought.
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Interesting read, even for a non-geek
- By A reader on 04-23-25
By: Benjamin Wallace
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The Good Death
- A Guide for Supporting Your Loved One Through the End of Life
- By: Suzanne B. O’Brien RN
- Narrated by: Suzanne B. O’Brien RN
- Length: 7 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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For most of us, there is no harder life experience than caring for a loved one who is dying. Suzanne O'Brien realized this earlier than most during her her time working as a nurse in hospice care, often offered as a comforting alternative to a sterile hospital environment. But Suzanne saw the real financial and staffing limitation that came with hospice, and, realizing this option didn't provide all the answers, wanted to take it a step further, providing her patients and their families with the tools to approach the death of a loved one with grace, dignity, knowledge, and compassion.
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Helpful
- By Leslie on 05-11-25
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Let Only Red Flowers Bloom
- Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping's China
- By: Emily Feng
- Narrated by: Emily Feng
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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The rise of China and its great power competition with the U.S. will be one of the defining issues of our generation. But to understand modern China, one has to understand the people who live there–and the way the Chinese state is trying to control them along lines of identity and free expression. In vivid, cinematic detail, Let Only Red Flowers Bloom tells the stories of nearly two dozen people who are pushing back.
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Fascinating and eye opening
- By PK-TX on 05-31-25
By: Emily Feng
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The Narrative Brain
- The Stories Our Neurons Tell
- By: Fritz Alwin Breithaupt PhD
- Narrated by: Brian Wiggins
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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As humans, we think in stories—stories that allow us to feel and share emotions. In order for this phenomenon to work, our brains and the ways in which we tell stories must be attuned to each other. But how exactly does this happen? Tapping into the essence of thinking in stories, Fritz Breithaupt draws on the latest scientific research, including a retelling study (comparable to the telephone game) with more than 12,000 participants, and experiments in which ChatGPT functions as storyteller.
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Off the Spectrum
- Why the Science of Autism Has Failed Women and Girls
- By: Gina Rippon
- Narrated by: Catherine Bailey, Gina Rippon
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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In Off the Spectrum, cognitive neuroscientist Gina Rippon sheds light on how old ideas about autism leave women behind and how the scientific community must catch up. Generations of researchers, convinced autism was a male problem, simply didn’t bother looking for it in women, creating a snowball effect of biased research. Correcting a major scientific bias, Off the Spectrum provides a much-needed exploration of autism in women to parents, clinicians, and autistic women themselves.
By: Gina Rippon
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Funny Because It's True
- How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire
- By: Christine Wenc
- Narrated by: Christine Wenc
- Length: 12 hrs
- Unabridged
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In 1988, a band of University of Wisconsin–Madison undergrads and dropouts began publishing a free weekly newspaper with no editorial stance other than “You Are Dumb.” Just wanting to make a few bucks, they wound up becoming the bedrock of modern satire over the course of twenty years, changing the way we consume both our comedy and our news. The Onion served as a hilarious and brutally perceptive satire of the absurdity and horrors of late twentieth-century American life and grew into a global phenomenon.
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Her lack of knowledge.
- By Anonymous User on 04-20-25
By: Christine Wenc
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Firstborn
- A Memoir
- By: Lauren Christensen
- Narrated by: Lauren Christensen
- Length: 4 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Lauren Christensen is a thirtysomething editor in New York City when she meets her future husband, Gabe, a writer with whom she falls in love right away. Her beloved grandfather is dying, but the young couple is bringing new life into the family: Lauren and Gabe joyfully discover she is pregnant with their daughter, Simone. As Lauren faces the prospect of becoming a parent, she learns to let go of the fear of abandonment and need for control, but just weeks after their wedding, they learn that their worst nightmare has come true: Simone is dying in the womb.
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Beautiful
- By Ashley M. on 03-28-25
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How to Feed the World
- The History and Future of Food
- By: Vaclav Smil
- Narrated by: Joe Jameson
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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We have never had to feed as many people as we do today. And yet, we misunderstand the essentials of where our food really comes from, how our dietary requirements shape us, and why this impacts our planet in drastic ways. As a result, in our economic, political, and everyday choices, we take for granted and fail to prioritize the thing that makes all our lives possible: food. In this ambitious, myth-busting book, Smil investigates many of the burning questions facing the world today.
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lots of dense information, hard to absorb.
- By chris on 05-20-25
By: Vaclav Smil
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Lights On
- How Understanding Consciousness Helps Us Understand the Universe
- By: Annaka Harris
- Narrated by: Annaka Harris
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Original Recording
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Is consciousness a fundamental building block of the universe, like gravity? Can humans develop new senses through neuroscience? And can artificial intelligence ever truly replicate the subjective experience of being conscious? Join Annaka Harris as she calls on distinguished experts in science and philosophy to find answers to today’s most perplexing questions about our minds and the universe at large.
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Disappointed
- By Amazon Customer on 04-01-25
By: Annaka Harris
empathy masterclass
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The book we need right now
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Interesting though ableist
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Diagnosed to Death
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