Asadullah Bin Amir 

Prof. Shamecca Harris 

03/23/20 

English 

Reading Response #1

In the essay “Our Patients” by Elise Wu, Wu is trying to portray the factitious subculture. A culture of people who fake their illnesses to receive care and attention. Throughout the essay, Wu is portraying the experience that she personally went through by giving her point of view. Wu stresses the fact that there is an abundance amount of worry when it comes to having the  factitious disorder. She does her best to help the reader visualize the fears of the individual with this specific disorder, one of many is the individual’s fear of being abandoned by their loved ones. Wu goes on to explain that she found herself exaggerating her symptoms in order to get her doctor to trust her and give her the right medication. In order to research this further, Wu researched about the patients, their families, and their doctors. Through her research she found an online community in the form of a visual discussion group for people interested in the disorder. Wu created a verbal portrait by keeping track of the people who posted comments, also she took notes from that. Wu used other sources offline to triangulate the data she gathered from the other Factitious Disorder websites. Throughout all this Wu decided to keep her name a secret because she only wanted to learn about the Factitious Disorder and did not want to expose any of the people who treated her or were there when she was facing the disorder. The footnotes were extremely helpful in Wu’s text because the readers can easily get the idea of what she was talking about instead of searching the things online. Also, it protects the information and gives credibility to the data that were collected. Wu does an amazing job in reflecting on her personal life while sharing with others the severity of the disorder.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.