Our Patients By Elise Wu Analysis

In the fieldwork ‘Our Patients” written by Elise Wu. This project is about an unfamiliar illness called factitious disorder. We learn that factitious disorder is a serious mental disorder in which someone deceives others by appearing sick. Elise Wu also suffered from this illness a couple years ago before doing her research. She uses both her memories and an online community to conduct her research. She shows an excellent way to gather both primary and secondary research to make her writing very informative. She uses two websites to gather more information about FD. She gets her information for Dr.Fieldman’s Website. I noticed how she describes exactly what she sees on the page. Wu states” I recognize the message-board format, posts sorted

She starts to reflect on how every time she went to the ER her caretakers never noticed she is faking the pain. How she was scared to tell her caretakers the truth. While she is starting reading post she contacts it to how she felt years ago. The main subject was about confrontation or abandonment. She started seeing a lot of the same patterns on how people were feeling with this disorder. In the virtual portal she gave herself an anonymous name. Wu states that she felt like she had to manufacture another persona to join the community. She states that topic of conversation that was mostly talked about was is the decision to “come out”— to therapists, doctors, family members, and friends. However, a lot of members confessed that they already came out and this surprises Wu. All the conversations had on the chat were on a personally level. All the members confided in each other. For instance, one of the members Caroline states “I used to fantasize about [doctors] saving me, and EMT technicians bringing me back from the edge,”. Overall. She interacts with a lot of online informants that help her throughout her