The online community Wu is trying to portray are people who are looking for answers. They express their concerns and their urgent need for answers especially from the doctor they are asking. The verbal portrait she creates of this community are concerned people. They go through their loved ones having FD and looking for answers to help cure them. With the doctor’s responses, some of them are sort of helpless. For example, the doctor in one of the posts answering back to an individual says that the person thinking they have the illness has to accept it and go for treatment themselves. The sources she uses are real life people who are actually going through it themselves. She takes tracks of the dates and how it was asked. She also records how the doctor responds and if the doctor seems as if the only way to cure the disease is for the people to accept their stage and get the help they need. The role that footnotes plays in her finding is that they keep track of the peoples comments she reads and what may be important to her. She singles out the things that are important or that she associates with herself with. Wu compares herself a lot to what she reads and she is concerned about what damage she causes herself and she appreciates that she is actually realizing the harm she is doing her body. When she came to realize she had FD she wanted to have high chances of having a good outcome.

Elise Wu’s “Out Patients” portrays her experience with Factitious Disorder (FD)before and after her “self-diagnosis”. Prior to her self-diagnosis, she battled with the compulsion of seeking medical attention without dealing with actual symptoms. This journey also pained her loved ones who was unsure of how to deal with Elise and her health scares because of the disagreement between her symptoms and the results of medical tests. After researching her condition she realizes that she is not facing this illness alone, and discovers communities who are willing to share their stories on how they deal with FD.

Wu does a great job creating a verbal portrait in her writing. She provides details from her past experience in the emergency room. For instance, she recalls one experience when a doctor and a group of interns visits her in a room. She remembers the doctor giving her the speech that many people with FD face; a conversation that does not blame her for faking anything, but gives a “heads up” to the patient that they are aware that nothing is wrong with them. Another instance where Wu applies a great verbal portrait is when she describes Dr. Marc Feldman’s smile. She describes his smile as a smile where his intentions are not wholehearted. This smile deeply resonates with her; “If I am a freak, I don’t want to feel like someone else is making money by sensationalizing my misfortune, self-induced or otherwise”. Thus, these two examples helps the reader a gain a more personal feel to Wu and her thoughts and feelings regarding her illness.

Wu relies on many sources to further enhance her writing. To start, she first gets information about her illness online through Dr. Feldman’s website and his online forum. She describes her experience on this website as unpleasant because the chat included many members of loved ones who faced FD not actual members who live with the illness. Additionally, she triangulates information from her sources to further support her writing. For instance, she notes how Dr. Feldman was not being as effective in his responses in his online forum, and was too focused in promoting his book. Wu then provides many examples where this occurs, further proving her point. Another example where she triangulates information is in Dr. Feldman’s forum. “Odette” is concerned over her mothers behavior with FD and asks Dr. Feldman for advice. After Feldman’s advice of trusting your instincts, Wu starts to speak upon the difference in responses the doctor is advising, showing how unhelpful the doctor truly is.
Footnotes play an important role in Wu’s text. Footnotes provides the reader more information about the quote Wu chose. Additionally, the footnotes provides the reader the source of her information, in the chance that any of her readers would like to further investigate a certain topic.

In conclusion, Elise Wu’s “Out Patient” talks about the experience Wu has faced in her journeying before and after her self-diagnosis of Factitious Disorder. Her writing gives readers a strign insight on the community of FD’ers and the challenges they faced in overcoming their illness.

The online community Wu is trying to portray are people diagnosed or self-diagnosed with factitious disorder. The text begins Wu describing how she felt while faking appendicitis symptoms: she “let his gentle words wash over my body, curled on a narrow gurney” and she is “left aching for more at the same time that I’m flooded with shame and fear.” (P143) The disorder is defined as someone who pretends to be sick and an extreme version of the disorder is called Munchausen syndrome, people fake illness and also self inflict harm for the act. She creates a verbal portrait of this community through imagery and by describing the posts on the thread. She explains the anxieties people with FD have about getting caught and she shares her fear. She mentions how people confess to their therapists and some people on the forum know someone with the disorder. She uses different online sources such as the Cleveland clinic foundation website, Dr.Feldman’s website, and Munchausen library. She cites statistics from professionals in the field such as Dr.Feldmen and uses his prognosis. She triangulates what she reads in the forum, her personal research, and her own subjective experience dealing with FD. She explains how open the Q&A environment on the forum is and how it is utilized by people who have loved ones that have “hard to detect conditions.” She also describes Dr.Feldman’s redundancy in promoting his book. The footnotes Wu provides give an organized list of her sources but also give background context on the factitious disorder.

On the essay “Out Patients” written by Elise Wu; she is trying to portray the FD or Factitious Disorder community. She approaches to this community by providing information about the trends or behaviors that the people within this community shows. First, she shares an experience of herself going into emergency showing some presumable symptoms. Something that stand off of this illustration she is providing is that she thinks to herself that people in the emergency room would not expect that she would be sick in the way she was. Here is where the Factitious Disorder comes in. She describes that in the past she have faked her illnesses and by this her relatives were affected. Wu is very descriptive on how this disorder have been named; she provides a list disorders that she found as book titles: “Untangling the Web of Factitious Disorder, Munchausen Syndrome, Munchausen by Proxy, and Malingering.”  these being different yet very similar in the concept of “faking illness” or the manifestation of psychological problems into physical ones.  She also provides information of how people have searched and form communities seeking for help on how to treat people with this disorder. In order to sharpen her information, she provides her own perspective on how this have affected her, she also provides information of how people seek for help on trying to help relatives that suffer from this disorder and the scientific information on how these individuals behave and what their ends are. Lastly, the use of the footnotes serve Wu as a direct reference to where she gets her information from.

In Wu’s essay “Out Patients”, it portrays and describes the Factitious disorder community and their beliefs. Being a member of this culture/community Wu describes it as, people who fake their illnesses to simply act out the role of a patient. Speaking from Wu’s personal experience she said, “I close my eyes again and let his gentle words wash over my body…  I’m tingling everywhere… when the moment is over, i’m left aching for more at the same time I’m flooded with shame and fear.” as a FD member she felt terrible faking her illnesses but the hunger for attention overcame her but, because of this playing the role of a patient was enjoyable for her. 

In describing her disorder and desires she creates of verbal portrait of FDers levels. In researching the disorder she finds an online community that describes their fears and passions.  Some speak of the fear of being caught while others fear being manipulated but, they continue to play the role of the patient to satisfy their pleasures. The most noticeable things in the blog and online communities are their inside language. Some using the term “coming out” to signify that they fake illnesses and to address a form of trust with other FDers. To triangulate these beliefs and inside information she finds multiple communities online that express the same fears on their message boards. 

Wu’s footnotes in her text brought credibility but also privacy to her community. By including information about dates, sensations, and fears it brought each individual’s mindset to life. By speaking about her own feelings and her guilt she made her text more powerful and relatable especially to those in the Factitious Disorder community.

When reading the first couple of paragraphs of Elise Wu’s “Out Patients” I had no idea what to expect. Wu introduced the topic of having a factitious disorder pretty brilliantly. Using her own experience as the introduction really helped the reader understand her perspective. When talking about the disorder Wu uses personal details as well as other people perspectives on it as she discovers the online communities sharing their stories.

In fact, there are a few. Wu goes into to two online platforms both representing different needs surrounding the factitious disorder throughout the essay. In the end she compares and contrasts both experiences and both audiences.

Wu goes into very specific details as she describes the verbal portrait of this community on the page. While entering the site she says that her screen is a “sea-green background” that Dr. Feldman’s had a “expert’s smile” at the top of the page. Which gave her the chills and made her lose trust in the site. She also goes on to realize that it is not a place for the patients with FD but in fact it’s a place for the people who have interacted with it and who were hurt by it to come and ask questions and seek support. It was a one-way street, not a community.

Initially going onto the first website, Wu became discouraged after doing some scrolling. She noted that the doctor who created the platform wasn’t very helpful at all and seemed to have his own agenda by answering questions vaguely and plugging his books to gain further information, which created a false sense of community in the eyes of Wu. After she finds the site that actually is a site for FDers by FDers, cravin4care, she realizes the dynamics are different. Wu uses personal stories on the site to help the audience understand more of the meaning and purpose of the new site. There is more direct interaction, you “are” somebody meaning, you have to create a persona and personally subscribe to be a part of the website instead of just aimlessly scroll. What was different about this site was that you were able to make connections people returned to the site, people created friendships. She compares the two sites. Wu

even comes across stories of people “coming out” and trusts their stories. Wu relies on this source which influences her to seek help.

After finishing reading this essay, I’m glad it had a happy ending, I for sure thought this was going to be a story about how someone finds an online platform that fits them perfectly but I’m glad it wasn’t. On another note the human body never ceases to amaze me.

Elise Wu is trying to portray the life of those who have a mental illness called Factitious disorder which is when one fakes an illness or exaggerates symptoms they may have. Although she has the disorder, I notice that when she describes the community of FDers more often than not she does not include herself. Is as if she is a different entity than them. I also notice that Wu writes about the families and friends affected by those closest to them who fake their illness. She notices that the majority of the people in the website she is on, are people seeking advice on how to deal with someone with FD. She provides details on what the people are commenting and their response to one another. When Wu joins a group chat of FDers, she describes them as conversational by sharing their stories and developing friendships with one another. Through this group chat she meets different types of people such as those who confess to their therapist about their disorder and those who want to confess but do not know how to. The more she reads, she confesses that she does not feel any type of empathy for these people and worries that she doesn’t belong. She uses multiple websites as the sources for her research as well as her personal experience regarding her topic. She ends up coming out to a former doctor about her Factitious disorder. The footnotes serve as context to what she is citing in her writing.

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.

Elise Wu’s essay “The Out-Patients” is about the online community that is on Factitious Disorder where people with FD create psychological or physical symptoms to take on the role of the patient according to Wu. The essay starts with one of Wu’s experiences where she discusses how she always feels guilt after and finds out that she isn’t the only one who does this. she does some more research and finds articles by doctors, patients, and even family members. She later finds an online community filled with people that suffer from this disorder. Not only is it someone having FD scared of being caught but its also the fact that some are being manipulated. We then find out that the doctor that Wu doesn’t trust is also advising the online group she encounters, which then made her question if treatment was even worth it if it’s only being managed. Wu wanted a better recovery and to do that she knew she would have to observe how “FDer’s” interacted within that subculture. She describes “coming out”  as a term that FDer’s use when faking illnesses and knowing who they can trust. Two years later, Wu finds herself on Doctor Feldman’s webpage where she finds a virtual discussion group. Wu made sure to keep track of posts and comments. The sources that Elsie Wu uses is herself due to the fact that she has FD and uses her experience to validate and relate to other FDer’s. The role the footnotes play in Wu’s essay is to help the reader understand and contextualize what she is talking about without having FD or going to search up the meaning of some terms.

Mohammed Hossain

Shamecca Harris

English

3-23-20

Elise Wu is a patient with a disorder called Factitious Disorder.  This disorder comes from the worry of not receiving attention from people they love. So they fake their illnesses to get the attention they want. One time Wu went on internet and did some research about faking injuries and found out it was a sort of a disorder so wu took a break from it for about 2 years. Wu found a online community of people with with similar situation as her. . She was  always checking posts that were being posted on the site, taking notes of time and dates for the posts. She also notes down who posts what in the group. Well for source, she uses her own experiences Recalls the moment when a doctor was giving lessons to students while she was on the hospital bed. This made her realize that the doctors knew about Wu’s fake illness and were telling it to the students. Also, Wu used fake identity to hide herself from others. Wu uses the language “coming out” , a way to tell the people that she faked her illness. The footnotes were very helpful. It gives the reader a clear sense of what the author is trying to present.