“Brain on Fire” proves just how little we know about our minds. In this revealing book, Susannah Cahalan takes the reader on a journey through the deterioration of her mind due to a rare autoimmune disease that caused her body to attack her own brain. Cahalan was a woman my age when her symptoms first began. They presented as paranoid schizoaffective disorder with significant mood swings leading her doctors to be thoroughly confused, diagnosing her with anything from bipolar disorder to alcoholism. When she began having seizures, she was finally admitted to the epilepsy unit at the hospital where the real work could begin to figure out that mysterious illness was plaguing her.

I found this book particularly interesting because it gives a perspective on illnesses of the mind from someone who actually lived through it. Cahalan fully admits that much of the events of the book she cannot remember herself because of her rapidly deteriorating mental condition. She relied on medical records, interviews, and video tapes to reconstruct what happened to her and the reader gets the sense that she is discovering herself all over again. The illness affecting her brain was so severe, 25% of those diagnosed end up passing away or never fully regaining their past self. Even more startling is that the disease had not been described until 2006, and Cahalan was diagnosed in 2009. Toward the end of the book, Cahalan reflects on how many people confined to psychiatric wards, mental institutions, or prisons may in fact have the same disease that afflicted her. And even more troubling, how many people throughout history were deemed possessed or witches due to their radical change in behavior.

Something else I found interesting about this book is how eloquently it describes confusing and troubling emotions. Cahalan’s mental state was altered by a disease rather than a mental illness, but the behaviors, paranoias, and emotions she experienced because of her troubled mind could be compared to someone with mental illness. The difference with Cahalan’s case is that she received treatment and is no longer trapped by her mind. She came out the other end of her illness able to see the perspective of someone with mental illness and intimately relate to them because she lived it. She is now more aware of her own mind and the complexities of memory, emotion, and humanity. Her story is worth a read.

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Created Apr 12, 2019 at 3:02pm • Submit your own review...