American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life

Award-winning writer Lunden chronicles her decades-long experience with chronic fatigue syndrome in a memoir that will be relatable to readers who’ve felt gaslighted by medical professionals. She was forced to become her own advocate, scientist, and archivist, cataloguing the many treatments and approaches with which she tried to keep her myriad symptoms at bay. She eventually finds relief through targeted brain retraining, the goal of which is to take her limbic system out of overdrive, and which gives primacy to the mind-body connection. Her narrative in the memoir is juxtaposed with the medical travails of Alice James, sister of writer Henry James and psychologist William James, who may have had a similar diagnosis as Lunden. However, James was repeatedly dismissed as suffering from hysteria, and Lunden notes how little has changed over the past century for women patients. This memoir comes to similar conclusions as Porochista Khakpour’s Sick and Elinor Cleghorn’s Unwell Women, determining that holistic approaches should be incorporated into modern medicine; that medical professionals need to listen to women patients; and that universal health care must be a basic human right.