Elise Wu is trying to portray the factitious subculture. A culture of people who fake their illnesses to receive care and attention. Wu, who faked her illnesses is trying to recover from the behavior. Her first findings of this community is through a doctor, one she doesn’t trust is helping people in their best interest. She finds her first group of people that are victims of factitious disorder, someone they know, or love is manipulating them. This group is being advised by the same doctor that she distrusts. Just based on this doctor and group she is demotivated to recover. Two years later she returns to her route of recovery finding a group that is suffering from the factitious disorder. She calls these people “FDers”, although she is part of this group it feels like she’s looking on the outside in. To become part of this group she must provide her real identity which she fakes. Wu finds it ironic that most people are probably doing the same.
In the group, she identifies a lot of the tactics she also used to use as an “FDer”. She uses flashbacks to give us an idea of what she went through. One flashback is of her being observed by a group of medical students and a doctor. She realizes now that the doctor was hinting at her fake illness to the students, stomach pains that would come and go. As she realized this in the hospital she quickly tried to be discharge and change locations. Something “FDers” often do when they are found out.
Wu uses this language of “coming out” to describe telling people the truth about fake illnesses. This “coming out” is serious to “FDers”, they need to know who to trust, who would believe them and who will not be angry. Wu notes that after years of being in the group she’s become numb to these stories, that her empathy might’ve run out.
A lot of Wu’s footnotes are explanations for things that are not obvious to the reader. Some of her notes are also to increase the knowledge of her reader about certain words or phrases she uses in the text.

It was interesting to see how someone who suffers from the same disorder portrays those who are going through the same thing. A small part of me expected a story to be a bit different. I thought the community would be Wu’s safe space and a place where she doesn’t feel horrible about the things she’s done. But I was surprised when she got “bored” of the community and sought help from her old therapist. In a way, this group is great for those who have the disorder to realize they are not alone. But it could also make someone feel too safe that they don’t seek the help they need.

In Elise Wu’s essay “Out Patients,” she investigates the online community surrounding the medical condition called factitious disorder (FD). Wu creates a verbal portrait of this community by throwing the audience into an ER as she begins to describe her own experience. She also depicts the forum and group message board she visited during the study, giving behaviors that the posters tend to have in common when voicing their thoughts. Yet she distinguishes the two sites by explaining how their behaviors differ. Additionally, Wu lets the audience in on insider language – “coming out” referring to disclosing to those close to you of the medical condition.

Wu utilizes several different sources throughout the study. She uses herself as a source, having had FD herself, to insert her narrative and thoughts into her writing. She also employs medical facts to contextualize the subject of her study – especially after illustrating her memory at the beginning of the essay. Wu wields the observations she made on both the forum and group message board to show the perspectives of those with FD and those effected by FD.  Wu was able to triangulate her data by effortlessly switch perspectives. This enabled the reader to get a well-rounded view of the online community of FD. In her essay, Wu made the choice to incorporate footnotes which made the text flow easily. The footnotes helped give context to some things that the audience may not already know. Wu does a great job of portraying the online community she chose.