Author of the week: Susannah Cahalan

last updated 8 January 2015

Journalist Susannah Cahalan doesn’t mind admitting that she temporarily lost her mind, said Kayt Sukel in BigThink.com. Three years ago, while working as a reporter at the New York Post, the 24-year-old suddenly began experiencing psychotic symptoms, beginning with odd mood swings and graduating to hallucinations and seizures. Initially told she might be suffering from mono, she was eventually diagnosed with a newly recognized form of encephalitis caused when the immune system attacks receptors in the brain. Cahalan’s new memoir, Brain on Fire, is her attempt to recover the details of a month she doesn’t remember, a month she spent at times strapped to a hospital bed, at times catatonic. “My medical history was available to me through literally thousands of pages of medical records,” she says.

Bad as the experience was, it could have been worse, said Wency Leung in The Globe and Mail (Canada). As Cahalan notes, her condition could have been mistaken for schizophrenia, resulting in her institutionalization or possibly her death. The experience changed her view of mental illness. “What I’ve discovered is, at the end of the day, there’s no difference between me and someone with a psychiatric disorder, except that I was cured,” she says. Spreading the word about the disease was only one of Cahalan’s motivations for writing her story. “Another thing is there’s still a really huge stigma attached to mental illness. I hope this book will help destigmatize this in a way.”