Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

by Susannah Cahalan (Free Press 2012)

Vicki and I watched the movie based on this book a few weeks ago. I had never heard of either, but after we watched it, I reserved the book. It’s the story of how a young reporter at the New York Post began behaving bizarrely. Various doctors believed she was abusing alcohol, or she was under too much stress, or she was schizophrenic, or she was psychotic. She narrowly escaped being institutionalized, but was eventually diagnosed with a newly described (but likely very ancient) condition called Anti-NMDA-receptor encephalitis, in which the body’s immune system attacks its own brain. The “discoverer” of this condition, Josep Dalnau, and the doctor who diagnosed Cahalan, Souhel Najjar, suspect that some people believed to have autism or schizophrenia may actually have this condition, which is treatable (although it sometimes recurs). When Cahalan finally recovered enough to return to her job, her boss asked her if she would write an article about her ordeal for the Post. As a result of that article, which she later expanded into this book, the rate of diagnosis of this kind of auto-immune disease skyrocketed.