The philosopher Ian Hacking uses the term “looping effect” to describe the way that people get caught in self-fulfilling stories about illness. A new diagnosis can change “the space of possibilities for personhood,” he writes. “We make ourselves in our own scientific image of the kinds of people it is possible to be.” In an essay about the children diagnosed with resignation syndrome in Sweden, Hacking refers to Pascal’s wager: to avoid the possibility of eternal Hell, we should behave as if God is real even though we lack proof of his existence. Over time, we may internalize the faith we’d been simulating; our belief will become sincere. Hacking proposes that for some illnesses a similar process is at work. We find a way to express our distress through imitation, until, eventually, we “have ‘learned’ or—better—‘acquired’ a new psychic state.”