So I've obviously done a little bit of an introduction, but for people who don't know you, can you share a little bit more about your story?

Yes.

My story starts when I was a graduate student at the University of Illinois studying educational psychology.

And at the time, what's now known as functional neurological disorder had a very different name and connotation.

We had studied, of course, all kinds of, um, psychiatric disorders in my program, and one of them we studied was called conversion disorder, and we were told it was very common back in Freud's time when women were uneducated and naive, and it consisted of mostly women who were converting neuroses into fake physical symptoms such as paralysis, seizures, other t- types of disabilities.

And at the time, I didn't have any reason to question anything the professor said about it.

In fact, my only question was, "If this is so rare now that women are educated, why do we waste so much time studying it in class?" And then I just finished my qualifying exams, and I was looking forward to starting my dissertation and going on with my career, and I woke up one morning feeling dizzy.

Mm-hmm.