The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness

Part 2 begins with an interrogation of how O’Rourke’s illness has led her to confront her own ideas of “self.” In online forums, she reads of many autoimmune patients who link their illnesses to an internal failure of the self. Since autoimmunity is characterized as the body fighting against itself, O’Rourke explains that many patients use it as an opportunity to question the nature of their internal lives, adopting faulty metaphors related to self-destruction and suicide, largely because all that mid-20th-century science can offer them is the idea that the immune system both protects against foreign invaders and tolerates the “self.” As a result of this anthropomorphizing of the immune system, O’Rourke claims that it becomes very difficult not to view autoimmune responses as a psychological metaphor: the self attacking the self. O’Rourke then invokes the idea that these metaphors work within a society that seeks to imagine the self as a project for improvement. This tendency toward self-blame causes patients to lose sight of the fact that their illness is not a problem of the self, but a problem of the collective. If autoimmune diseases are on the rise because of environmental factors, O’Rourke suggests that perhaps these illnesses are a result of society-wide failure rather than individual shortcomings.