Book Review: Brain on Fire

Having suffered from clinical depression, I am always interested in learning more about how the brain influences one's mental health.  While waiting for a doctor appointment, I chanced upon an article about Susannah Cahalan's experience descending into madness for a month.  The article was fascinating, but I wanted to know more.  I wanted to read the full story.

In 2009, Susannah Cahalan was a vibrant, loquacious reporter with the New York Post.  In Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, Susannah tells the story of how she began experiencing paranoia over bedbugs, then started having hallucinations and eventually was wracked with terrifying seizures.  Her family looked on in astonishment as this bright young woman became unrecognizable to them.  She slipped from psychosis into catatonia.

Although the experience left her without vivid memories of the events, Susannah stepped into reporter mode.  She compiled interviews with her family, friends, and the amazing doctors who saved her life.  She secured journal entries from her father, hospital records and surveillance videos. Pulling together these puzzle pieces, Cahalan provides the tale of this extraordinary experience.  As the fly-leaf proclaims, "Far more than simply a riveting read and a crackling medical mystery, Brain on Fire is the powerful account of one woman's struggle to recapture her identity and to rediscover herself among the fragments left behind."

The story was, indeed, riveting.  The author was eventually diagnosed with something called anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis.  Basically, her immune system began attacking the right side of her brain.  Early tests all came back normal, until finally a brain biopsy revealed the intense inflammation.  Thankfully, Dr. Souhel Najjar, later named one of New York Magazine's best neurologists in the country, came on the case. 

It amazes me to think of what would have happened to this young woman if she had encountered these symptoms just a few years earlier.  At that point, doctors would not have figured out the connections or the nature of this disease.  She would have probably ended up in a mental hospital and eventually died of the ailment.  Because of their swift intervention, doctors were able to fight the inflammation on the brain and assist Susannah in returning to her normal self.

I've always explained my depression in this way.  When I am in the throes of it, I am clearly not myself.  I long to just be "me" again, but am often leery of the very medications that promise to return me to my rightful identity.  Who knows what these drugs are fully doing to my brain chemistry?  But this book, gives me hope that eventually doctors will more completely understand the links between the brain and mental illness.  As the author notes, "This is all the more reason that psychiatrists and neurologists are finding ways to break down the barriers set in place between psychology and neurology, urging for one uniform look at mental illnesses as the neurochemical diseases that they are, and, in the process, perhaps getting more grant money to study the overlap."  That, to me, is promising!