Susannah Cahalan
Susannah Cahalan (born January 30, 1985) is an American journalist and author, known for writing the memoir "Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness", about her hospitalization with a rare auto-immune disease, anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis. She has published a second book in 2019, called "The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness". When she is not writing longer works, she works as a journalist for the New York Post. Cahalan's work has raised awareness for her brain disease to make it more well-known and decrease the likelihood of others being  misdiagnosed. Personal Life and Career. The Writing of "Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness". As Susannah was a journalist for the New York Post before she became ill, her editor suggested that she write about her disease and how it impacted her. As she recovered from her brain illness, she decided to bring the same journalistic approach to writing her memoir, using fact and research as the foundation for her story. According to Cahalan, it was a "very dissociative process" to write about her experience with the disease. She had to recreate the time-line of everything that happened , gathering different records from the hospital to keep track of what happened and when. Through interviewing those closest to her, she was able to piece together what that month looked like. Overwhelmingly, what she remembered from her disease was the fear and anger that it created within her. Writing her book, she said, felt like regaining control over the body that controlled her for so long. Current Affairs. Cahalan still writes for the New York Post with articles published frequently. She is a public speaker, having given a lecture at the opening session of the American Psychiatric Association's 2017  meeting. In addition, she presents talks for hospitals and universities to raise awareness about her disease. Currently, she resides in Brooklyn, New York, sharing a home with her husband, twin boys, and dog. Anti-NMDA Receptor Encephalitis. Disease Presentation and Misdiagnoses. Susannah’s disease manifested in 2009 when she was just 24 years old. It began with sensory issues which she described in her article, "My Mysterious Lost Month of Madness", as experiencing the world “brighter, louder, more painful.” She also began experiencing numbness in the whole left side of her body, and paranoid hallucinations of bed bug bites. Concerned  by the numbness, Cahalan sought out a neurologist who ran multiple inconclusive tests including two normal MRIs. Susannah began experiencing severe insomnia and continued behavioral abnormalities. One night at her boyfriend’s apartment, she had a grand mal seizure and woke up in St. Luke’s Hospital. Cahalan describes the hospital neurologist as dismissive, and she received her first of multiple misdiagnoses: alcohol withdrawal. Psychiatrists also misdiagnosed her with schizophrenia and bipolar I disorder.Cahalan was released from the hospital and as her disease worsened, she had another grand mal seizure. Hospital Stay. After her second seizure, Cahalan’s parents  took her to the hospital for an EEG and demanded that she not be taken to a psychiatric floor. Unlike many Anti-NMDA cases, Cahalan was never admitted to a psychiatric ward. While at the hospital, Susannah had her third seizure and was immediately placed on the epilepsy floor of New York University’s Medical Center. Suanannah’s hallucinations and delusions soared during the month she spent in the hospital. Susannah had two lumbar puncture procedures that revealed high white blood cell counts. Because high white blood cells count signify brain swelling, the case was officially passed to neuro-pathologist  and epileptologist, Dr. Souhel Najjar at NYU medical center. Diagnosis (Anti-NMDA Receptor Encephalitis). Dr. Najjar has Cahalan perform a “clock test," which is a typical practice for evaluating if the cause of the illness is physical or mental. The test involves the patient drawing the face of a clock. Whenever Cahalan went to draw her clock, she was only able to recreate half of it, indicating that her brain on one side was swollen. After a brain biopsy, it was concluded that Cahalan's issue was not psychiatric, but the result of anti-NMDA encephalitis, a brain-inflammation disease  with an unknown cause. She was only the 217th person diagnosed with this illness. Treatment and Recovery. In order to treat her disease, she was given an assortment of different steroids, infusions, and plasmapheresis. She made a full recovery without suffering long-term brain damage. Film Adaptation. Netflix released a feature film based on Susannah Cahalan’s memoir, "Brain on Fire". The movie, which shares the title of the book, was directed by Irish filmmaker, Gerard Barrett. Chloe Grace Moretz stars in the film as she portrays Susannah Cahalan. The film chronicles the events leading to Cahalan’s misdiagnosis, hospitalization , and eventual diagnosis and recovery. Book about David Rosenhan. In 2019, Cahalan's second book was published, "The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness". In the work she accuses psychologist David Rosenhan of fabricating the results of seminal research published in the journal "Science". Rosenhan's work demonstrated that staff working at psychiatric hospitals, including psychiatrists, could be easily misled to diagnose schizophrenia when individuals were perfectly sane and reported the mistreatment of patients in these facilities. Cahalan was drawn to this study due to her own experiences with being improperly diagnosed with mental illness , but as she researched Rosenhan and his activity, she began to find contradictions in his work that made her question the validity of his experiment. Awards. Through the years, she has been awarded numerous academic fellowships. These include the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism from Yale University,  the Richardson Seminar in the History of Psychiatry from Cornell in 2020, and the Spitzer Memorial lecture from Columbia University in 2020.