“I am we, we are a year, we year, we are rest, we rest.” 

In winter 2024, Sop had a severe relapse of myalgic encephalomyelitis, also called chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), leaving them housebound in South East London.

That summer, in the days leading up to a friend’s birthday celebration, the artist rested carefully so they would be able to attend. The night before, they started taking what was touted as a “magic” pill for insomnia. They didn’t sleep at all and had to miss the party. But in a sleep-deprived haze, they wrote, as they described in a recent interview [1], “a solidarity rant, a kind of letter to other disabled people stuck indoors.” 

When Shape Arts, a UK disability arts organization, approached Sop with a commission, they decided to adapt the essay into a script for We Year, a mixed-media love letter to others living with energy-limiting conditions. The short film premieres at RestFest—a film festival and virtual space by and for the disability community—as part of a program co-organized by The Remote Body, Resting Up Collective, and Ort Gallery. 

With a poetic voiceover and ethereal soundscape, We Year immerses viewers in a chronic illness flare during a sweltering summer, blending decades-old archival footage from when Sop was well enough to move outside freely with recent phone footage shot at home. Shifting between past and present and between interior and exterior, the experience is at once isolating and unifying, claustrophobic and liberating. 

We Year also features 16mm direct animation, a technique that involves drawing and scratching moving images directly onto film stock rather than recording with a camera. Here, Sop used ink to overlay the orange stress bars from their Garmin watch across the entire film—a constant representation of their body that acts as a symbolic barrier between them and the audience. 

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

When did you begin to think of yourself as an artist? 

I always wanted to be an artist. Even as a kid, when I was asked, “What do you want to be?”, I was like, “An artist!” I honestly have never thought about doing anything else. I grew up in the deep countryside, and there wasn’t much access to contemporary culture, although I was obsessed with music and music magazines. There was this teen music magazine called Smash Hits that I loved, and I made collages and scrapbooks of pop stars. When I was 13, I went to a big retrospective of the massive British artist David Hockney, who just died, and it was the first time that I’d seen contemporary art. It blew my mind, and that’s the first time I remember thinking, “Oh, this is something serious that I want to do.” 

What questions or themes does your art usually explore? 

I find it hard to make work that isn’t about my life and the things that I’m dealing with. What I do always ends up being ultra-personal. That’s not something that a lot of people do, necessarily. The act of living as a chronically ill person means that you have to live in the world in a very different way from people who are not chronically ill. Chronic illness is a fertile area for ideas. You’re living the life and thinking about the life at the same time. If you’re an artist or someone who thinks about things in conceptual ways, you can’t help but try and interpret your life into art-making, projects, or ideas. Everything’s interesting. It’s like living life wonky.

As a chronically ill person,  I can’t do a 9 to 5. I can’t necessarily keep to plans, and I can’t always do basic things, like sometimes even look after myself in a normal  way. The agency that I have is to interrogate what this life means and the challenges that it poses and what is interesting about that. What can I say that’s beyond how I would perhaps describe being sick to a stranger? Like, what’s within that? All of the work that I make—even if it looks not about that—is going to be about that.   

And then the other part of it is that I grew up in the field and was a tomboy covered in mud. My understanding of the world was through nature, and now I’m in a flat without a garden. I can see some trees in the park just over there, but quite often, I’m not well enough to go and hang out in the park. I am pretty obsessed with nature and the fact that I can’t get to it. I can’t really have that life currently.  

In your bio, you describe yourself as “a torn and crooked leaf, a root embedded in the dirt, a shoot reaching to the sky.” Would you please elaborate on what this means? 

When I wrote that bio, I was making work about my body being the same as the microbiome in the soil. “A torn and crooked leaf” is being chronically ill. “A root embedded in the dirt” is really what it sounds like, within the context of that specific work. And the “shoot reaching to the sky”—my work deals with pretty hefty emotions, but there’s always hope. My life is not a miserable life; it is hopeful, and I do believe there’s something so crucial in being chronically ill that you absolutely have to keep hope alive. It takes a lot of work to do that and to get there. It’s not easy, but it’s super important. If you have this restricted life, you absolutely have to shoot for the sky. Because time just goes on.  

What does working in crip time [2] look like for you? What are your long-term goals as an artist? 

If you’re truly working in crip time, it’s fairly impossible to have long-term goals. You haven’t really got a choice when you work. You can do your very best to carve out time or space. Currently, I have about a couple of hours in the early morning when I can manage to do something. My afternoons and evenings—I simply can’t make work then. If you have such a limited time to make work, the amount of work you make is going to be low. It will have to meet your capacity, and that doesn’t fit well with current art market production timelines or expectations. Sometimes, you can’t make something for a year because the thing that you should be working on—and the thing that is your work—is your health. That’s your full-time job.  

I deeply believe that making in crip time actually is truthful to the world. We would probably all be better off if we did. Really, it means making work to your capacity, and that can mean a lot of things. You don’t need to be ill to make to your capacity. 

It’s a more authentic timeline of meeting yourself where you’re at, rather than forcing yourself to meet arbitrary or toxic timelines. 

You haven’t chosen to have chronic illness—you’re forced into doing that. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing necessarily. Asking what would I like to do for my long-term goals—I find it very hard to answer because, first of all, I live, like, day to day and, second, when I think about what my long-term goals would be, it’s from the perspective of someone without a disability because I currently cannot see how I would be able to do more than what I’m doing unless I had an enormous amount of more support. 

How did you decide which media to work with for this project? 

Films and writing have always been the two mediums I mostly turn to, and actually they’re the most accessible things for me to do now, being housebound. When I was asked to make the film, I just didn’t have it at all in my means to film new work or leave the house, so I had to kind of figure out how to make a new work out of what I had, which was this personal essay I wrote about being stuck inside in the summer. I made the film throughout another summer of being stuck inside. A lot of chronically ill people turn their camera or phone or whatever onto their surroundings, so I had bits and bobs that I filmed. When I started making films, I would just film tons of different stuff. I had my little Hi8 video camera around the whole time, so I had lots of little clips that I hadn’t used, and I didn’t actually think that I was ever going to use them for anything. But that obviously wasn’t enough, and I didn’t really want to make a film which was just a film inside my house—there’s plenty of films like that. I had a whole bunch of old footage from the 90s. I digitized all of these tapes a few years ago, and they looked so great. A lot of that stuff was filmed out of the house, and then there were funny effects that I filmed which made it into the films. There’s a lot of blobs of color, which are actually motorway lights and ended up being this really nice kind of texture, which floated over and broke up some of the images.  

Hi8 and MiniDVs are the two cameras I was using in the past, so I have footage from both of those. And then there was 16mm direct animation. Each section of the film has a different animation running over it, but the animation is quite transparent, so it’s always there. It’s textural and has multiple meanings. And then I commissioned my friend to make the soundtrack. 

Would you elaborate on the meaning of the title of the film? 

The thing that’s turned me on most about this film is the fact that I can try and get “to year” and “yearing” adopted as a new way of describing spending all this time being sick. I think the word “year” is long enough for people to imagine, “Whoa, you are sick for a whole year. That’s a really long, unbearable time.” But then you make it into “yearing,” and then it could be even less than a year, but it’s probably closer to a year or multiple years. Then I was interested in what would happen if the years were then broken up with periods of being well, with relapses included as well.  

I find it really tiresome to have to explain the last five years of my life. So to not have to say, “Well, I was sick for a couple of years, housebound and bedbound, and then I got well again, and then I had a relapse”—it’s just like, “I was yearing.” I would love for it to become part of the lexicon of chronic illness.  

What does it mean to have “We Year” screened at RestFest? 

There’s this informal network of crip friends who work with each other. Not everyone works together, but we all know each other and there’s really close friendships within this group. They’re all small, crip-led organizations that have been made pretty much for the same purpose, which is remote events, screenings, and workshops. I was just really keen to connect and uplift all of these organizations. We created this program together, and I’m really proud of it. It’s been a lot of work, but it’s really nice making things with your friends. The access intimacy side of it all is real. Creating or programming with your friends is a very accessible way of making because we all understand each other and our capacities. I’ve said capacities a million times. 

You need to coin a new term for that as well. 

Okay, I’ll get on that for next time. 

We Year, through July 12 (if you start watching on June 28); RestFest Film Festival. “I am we, we are a year, we year, we are rest, we rest.” 

[1] “Interview with artist-filmmaker Sop + a Special Screening of their New Film.” RestFest, 2026,
https://restfest.substack.com/p/interview-with-artist-filmmaker-sop. 
[2] In her 2013 book Feminist, Queer, Crip, disability scholar Alison Kafer writes, “Rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.” 

In her second collection, “I Watched You Disappear” Silver’s poems invited us to accompany her on her journey through treatment, anger, despair, determination, and faith. This third collection (her penultimate) continues the author’s beautifully written illness narrative, again presenting moments of joy and of despair, and always of hope. 

Silver places her title poem, “From Nothing” (pg. 1), before Section I as an epigraph to the entire collection. “Each death I witness makes me more my own,” she writes, and although the poem sees “muscle shredded” and “bone sheared,” the poem’s last lines lift, as do many of Silver’s poems, into hope and faith: “and my molecules will vault, emerging. / From darkening days, the light will surge and flee.” Section I begins with poems of memory–“Summers in Vermont” with her family (pg. 5)–and “Coincidence,” when her sister’s child is born on the same day that Silver holds her breath and presses her “shorn chest” to an X-ray machine (pg. 7). The memories here are of family moments, both the joyful and those tinged with such “darkening days.” In “Luzerne,” she recalls when time was “consigning” her to such darkness, but two things saved her: her son, the poet’s hand touching his “damp blond hair,” and poetry, “offering itself like a pair of velvet shoes” (pg.13). Silver develops the idea of poetry as a special entity, a gift that enables her to walk forward in her journey, in “Raven” (pg. 15). She imagines a raven lifting her, holding her, and then setting her down in her home, where, she says, “dawn drove a pen into my hand.” This sense of urgency and necessity pervades all of Silver’s poems, as if she has been commanded to write her story.  

Section II begins in “Anguish” (pg. 19) a stunning poem about the loss of her first child, a daughter, but the section ends in joy with “After a Favorable PET Scan” (pg. 38). It might be difficult to find another poem by any author that offers such resounding relief and happiness. This poem, especially, speaks to how terrible every test is for those who are suffering, for those whose test results might mean more medication, more surgery, or less time to live. The celebratory release felt by patients when results bring good news must be a special kind of joy: “Oh world, I will give you all my love. / I will race like a child through the fields, / I will chase off the unkindness of ravens. / My words will grow thick as marshes, / sheltering nests in salty steams.” The poems in Section II are some of the most beautiful and moving poems in this collection. See especially “Tenebrae” (pg. 21), a plea for life; “Poise” (pg. 26), a rant against giving in to cancer; “Snow White” (pg. 30), a poem of mourning for self and others; and “Four Prayers for Forgiveness” (pg. 34-35), a poem that turns illness into beauty: “–the scattered lumps in my lungs / become church domes roofed in green mosaics, / my bones’ fissures fill in with grass-green yarn. / . . . I open my eyes and all is golden.” 

Section III seems to present a corrective reaction to the joy expressed in the final poem in Section II. The poems in this last section are short, mostly one stanza, a catalog of things that are broken, cracked, ripped, or chipped. The warning that nothing lasts forever is implied in poems such as “Partings” (pg. 44) and “Woman with a Hole in Her Stocking” (pg. 45), in “Red Never Lasts” (pg. 47) and “Autumn” (pg. 57). Yet, as always in Silver’s poems, the warning is tempered by the beauty of her words and the depth of her insight into what it is to suffer over the course of an illness that has remissions and recurrences, that sees the body changed and relationships altered. In “Ideal Speech” (pg. 58), she writes “Listen to the Holy Ghost. She blows through you, / she blows her poems right through you.” Even when days seem darkest, the ideal speech for Silver is poetry, and she is the “you” through which the Holy Ghost speaks these auricles. In the book’s final poem, “Three Roses” (pg. 59), the author once again works her spell, turning illness into beauty and despair into hope. “Where only my scar line remains, a red rose blooms. / Luscious, full, so open that if it dropped a single petal, / it would not be as lovely as it is this very moment.” And in the poem’s final lines, “Lay her hands on my chest–here, I give it to you. / Feel your palm on my skin heat and spark,” What is the “it” she gives us? I believe that Silver invites us, as Whitman did, to merge with her and to live within her words, which are her flesh, the poems she writes and then gives us to read and ponder.  

Miscellaneous 

In my annotation of Silver’s second collection, “I Watched You Disappear,” I wrote that her poems might be difficult for some to read: “These poems are beautifully crafted, often primal, and they touch the deepest reaches of personal illness and the shadow of mortality. Readers who have breast cancer or who have family or friends living with breast cancer, might find these poems difficult to read–others under the same circumstances might find them difficult and yet, at the same time, essential.” The poems in this collection can be as raw as they are hauntingly beautiful. But, as do her other books, this one again opens to us a world apart, one we cannot enter unless we share this author’s diagnosis and illness trajectory. If we are caregivers or care receivers, if we suffer or we watch loved ones suffer, these poems plunge us into emotions that we ignore at our peril.  

Publisher Louisiana State University Press 
Place Published Baton Rouge 
Edition 2016 
Page Count 65 

A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database. 
Web image created by Medhum.org

A MacArthur Fellow and author of several acclaimed novels, Antrim has previously published a memoir of his upbringing with his alcoholic mother. In this new memoir, flashbacks of childhood neglect and chaos are juxtaposed with the present day as he takes the reader through the acute phase of his illness: a lengthy hospitalization, a course of ECT, discharge from the hospital, rehospitalization, and eventual stabilization.  

The author considers his condition to be suicide, noting that “depression is a concavity, a sloping downward and a return. Suicide, in my experience, is not that. I believe that suicide is a natural history, a disease process, not an act or a choice, a decision or a wish…I will refer to suicide, not depression” (pp. 14-15).   

The book ends on a hopeful note. After several relationships that might be described as codependent, Antrim meets his current partner, whom he marries. He sees the roof of his building through his window and remembers a certain Friday in April but is comforted by the sound of his wife playing Chopin and Bach on the piano.  

This is an exceptionally brave book. Antrim does not attempt to whitewash his situation in any way. Surely it is humiliating for someone so successful to acknowledge he has been utterly debilitated. He loses track of time. He gains weight and cannot fit into his clothes. His new book is released, but he is in no condition to help promote it. At first, he objects to being called psychotic but eventually it comes as a relief to know he is understood. One Friday in April will be inspirational to others who have suffered to see how an accomplished person is reduced to being allowed to use his razor only under strict supervision.   

At times Antrim touches on the link between mental illness and creativity. If he had hoped the cathartic exercise of writing about his childhood would have stopped his illness he learns otherwise: “Writing had not stopped my dying. (p. 80)” At another point, his friends joke that his diagnosis “might enhance my literary reputation” (p. 115). Finally, in one of the more poignant episodes in the book, Antrim gets a call from the novelist David Foster Wallace and is encouraged to undergo ECT. He has an excellent response to that treatment, but later learns that Wallace has hanged himself.  

While a diagnosis of psychotic depression fits best with the range of symptoms the author manifests, his point about suicide as a distinct disorder is well taken. In fact, the most recent edition of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) took the major step of including Suicidal Behavior Disorder as a “condition for further study.” This corroborates the author’s experience and means that SBD might be included in a later edition. (see also https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2020.499980/full)   

Those who are looking for an exposé or critique of the mental health system will not find it here. Antrim credits his psychiatrists and the hospital with helping him get through an unbearable time. One Friday in April is a book that will give reassurance to people who have endured suicidal thoughts that if they persist they will get better.  

Publisher W.W. Norton & Company 
Place Published New York 
Edition 2021 
Page Count 141 

Web image from Wikicommons
An earlier version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts and Medicine Database 

Demon Copperhead is nothing if not a novel centered on social concerns. It tells the story of a child born to a drug addicted mother in an oxycontin-ravaged community in western Virginia. He is delivered inside an intact amniotic sac, an anomaly that foreshadows a life-long fixation to see the ocean, any ocean. His mother has abysmal taste in men and repeatedly chooses to live with men who abuse her and physically threaten Demon. When she dies of a drug overdose, Demon is placed in foster care and forced to work countless hours as a virtual slave under horrible circumstances, without any consideration for his safety, by the person who is supposedly responsible for his wellbeing. He runs away and has a miserable encounter on the road with a streetwalker who entraps him and steals the hard-earned money that he has secretly saved and stashed away. Against all expectation, Demon reconnects with his dead father’s family, and they place him in a much more stable and secure environment – the home of the venerated coach of the local high school football team.  

The coach takes a liking to Demon. He recognizes Demon’s hidden strengths and talents and encourages Demon to try out for the football team. Much to his surprise, Demon achieves star status as a tight end, no longer a faceless hillbilly from the back country of mobile homes. But true to the trajectory of the novel, Demon suffers a major injury to his knee. He refuses surgery and tries to tough it out. Pain medication is key to this strategy and, of course, this being Appalachia in the late 1990s, oxycontin is too easily prescribed by doctors and too accessible to patients. A painful decline into addiction and despair ensues. Many of Demon’s peers fall victim to the oxycontin plague. But unlike them, Demon is resilient. He is a talented artist, and from early childhood he would draw cartoon-like sketches to escape from his desultory life.  

With the help and support of an art teacher who takes him under her wing during high school, Demon creates a comic strip that dramatizes life in the backwoods of Virginia and that gains regional notoriety. As the novel nears the end, there is a dramatic passage in which Demon confronts his social nemesis on a mountain ridge during a windswept rainstorm. It evokes a climactic episode in Kingsolver’s earlier prize-winning book, The Poisonwood Bible, where the life of a key character is threatened by an attack of army ants in the middle of the night. Ultimately, Demon enters drug rehabilitation, perseveres through the rigors of withdrawal, and gets clean. Against all expectations, Demon finds love and redemption. The woman of his dreams has been there all along, but when it happens, you cannot help but smile as you watch the two lovers acknowledge their feelings for one another. 

The title of the novel is a dead giveaway of who inspired it and Kingsolver acknowledges her debt to Charles Dickens in the postscript. Like her Victorian predecessor, Kingsolver is writing to protest the neglect and abuse that people, but especially children, living in post-manufacturing America have been forced to endure at the end of the 20^th century and into the next. In her vision, the grim experiences of people like Demon and his family, whose lives are attached to the land, are profoundly different from city dwellers. After their land was stripped of its natural resources, the rural communities in states like Virginia and Tennessee were left to languish economically and fall victim to predatory pharmaceutical companies which promoted the use of drugs that the proprietors knew would increase dependence and addiction.  

There is a relentlessness to this story and Kingsolver’s voice in many respects echoes the Biblical prophets. For some readers, the book is almost too depressing. But I think that fails to give enough credit to her Dickensian style and outlook. The sequence of episodes in different locations and with a revolving cast of characters is reminiscent of the publication of Dickens’ novels in serial installments that can almost stand alone. The narrative pulsates with non-stop action and there is an optimism that Demon will always pull through. He is an engaging character, blessed with emotional reserves and intellectual gifts that enable him to overcome his baleful surroundings. In that sense, his story, like Dickens’ novels, may strike some as unrealistic. Perhaps that is the most effective way a writer can successfully enlist readers to rally to her social cause, by offering a vision of personal triumph over social and cultural adversity. 

Coming back to the question I asked at the outset, can a novel inspired by social protest survive its era and outlive the conditions that spurred the author to put pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard? Novels like David Copperfield and The Grapes of Wrath are affirmative answers. I predict that the artistry of Demon Copperhead will ensure that it will still be read long after the environmental damage incurred by the coal mining industry and the human devastation of the opioid epidemic recede into history. Demon’s voice is so alive, his character is so engaging, and his tale is so moving that I am confident that the book will be on bookshelves or in data storage tools in a hundred years. It may be necessary to add notes to explain the ins and outs of the coal mining industry and how oxycontin was approved and marketed to an unsuspecting population, but those will be details that will not obscure the deep humanity of the book.  

Oprah In Conversation with Barbara Kingsolver

DEMON COPPERHEAD 
Barbara Kingsolver 
Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 2022, 548pp 

Web photo by George Hiles 

For nearly two decades after the fatwa was issued, his literary career flourished, and he became a visible spokesperson for freedom of artistic expression. As president of PEN, Rushdie promoted initiatives to protect and promote the careers of writers living in fear under repressive political regimes. In August 2022, he was invited to speak on this topic at the Chatauqua Institution, an adult education and social movement. On a sunny summer morning, as he sat on the stage of the amphitheater to begin a public conversation with his interlocutor at Chatauqua, he noticed a man dressed in black suddenly rise up from the middle of the audience and charge the platform. There was no security at Chatauqua that day or any other day because the violent world had never intruded into the bucolic space of the institution during its entire 148 year history. Rushdie found himself rooted to the spot, frozen and unprepared to defend himself as the attacker stabbed him seventeen times – in his eye, his face, his neck, his chest, his abdomen, his hand. Heroic people charged the stage and subdued the assailant. Miraculously, Rushdie survived and he was helicoptered to the nearest trauma center for emergency treatment. Knife is a meditation on the event, the ordeal of rehabilitation that Rushdie had to endure, and his reaction now that he is healed, and his life is restored.

Knife is a visceral book that is grounded in the harsh reality of crazed, religious zealots and painful, tedious rehabilitation. It is different from the magical prose that characterizes much of Rushdie’s writing. The events are described in excruciating detail. One can feel the hurt and sense the worry etched into the pages. It is testament to the many doctors and nurses and therapists who took part in his bodily reconstruction and long convalescence. Most of all it is an inspiring testament to his wife who had the fortitude to be at his bedside throughout the entire ordeal . Rushdie gives her most of the credit for his stamina, the tenacity and resilience that he displayed during the long months after the attack. He substitutes an imaginary dialogue with his attacker in lieu of a face-to-face encounter in prison to express his contempt for his religious intolerance. Rushdie and his wife summon the courage to revisit the Chautauqua stage one year after the attack and achieve some degree of closure on the event.

There is much humanity and wisdom in these pages, lessons on how to confront and overcome adversity. One might question what we, mere mortals, can learn from a singular person like Rushdie who was blessed with such an abundance of human and professional resources to draw on as he recuperated from his injuries. However, differences in fame and access to expertise do not ultimately carry the day. Instead, it is how we as individuals, regardless of our wealth or social status, are able to tap our inner strength and utilize the help and support of our loved ones. The task for us all is to draw on our cognitive and psychological reserves and convert life-threatening tragedies into surmountable setbacks. If, like Rushdie, we succeed, then we will have reached a more mature and meaningful embrace of life in all its beauty and complexity. Rushdie’s story played out in the international limelight. The narrative also unfolds every day on countless hospital floors and rehabilitation units the world over as people strive to overcome injury and illness in their own private world. Rushdie’s template is universal.

But for readers of the Medhum website, I suggest that there is an unspoken but instructive message lurking in Rushdie’s story, specifically for health care providers, doctors and nurses both. There were unexpected turns of events during Rushdie’s recovery. It was not an uninterrupted march from near death to healing. He experienced disabling complications from medications that were prescribed for rational clinical reasons, iatrogenic problems. In one case, severe urinary retention requiring repeated painful bladder catheterization, it was only through the astute observation of one of the clinicians that the causative medication was stopped and the problem spontaneously resolved. In another, he experienced symptomatic hypotension, a disabling side effect of one of the drugs prescribed for him. There was a cancer scare when an imaging study performed to assess his urological problems. suggested he might have a lesion in his prostate. He experienced excruciating pain when his eyelids needed to be sutured together to protect his injured eye. In each case, Rushdie was reassured that things were proceedings according to plan and that things should improve with time. Follow up tests were done to monitor the prostate anomaly and confirm improvement in his symptoms but the discomfort and unease lingered in his body and his mind. The anxiety that the problems might not resolve was ever present in Rushdie’s consciousness. 

Doctors know that recovery from injury or illness is a time consuming process that rarely occurs overnight. They are right to encourage their patients to take the long view of their health problems, to reassure them the treatment is usually a continuing proposition. But even for a highly intelligent patient like Rushdie, the doctor’s confidence in how things were going could never completely allay the fear that his broken body would not heal, and his health would not be restored to what it had been pre-knife attack. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for groundbreaking studies that explored how people assess loss and gain and make financial decisions. Kahneman expanded on their studies in behavioral economics and proposed that rational thought utilizes two operational modes. System 1 is rapid and instinctive in contrast to system 2 which is slower, more deliberative, and more reasonable. Channeling this work by Kahneman, there may be two systems operating during recovery from bodily injury. Doctors may be employing an analog System 2 method of thought as the disease is steadily halted, reversed, and repaired. Patients, however, live through illness in a binary System 1 approach of thought: sick or back to normal. We physicians would do well to remember that the only words our patients really want to hear from us when they come to us for care are, “You are now fine. We can stop the medications and stop the follow up. You are back to normal.”

Knife
Salman Rushdie
Knopf 2024, 209 pages