When you talk to Susannah Cahalan on the phone, you'd never imagine that this is a woman who has been to hell and back. Without warning 5 years ago, she descended into a nightmare of paranoia, hallucinations, catatonia and near death. One moment she's a journalist living the high wire life in the New York media world and the next, her brain is swimming in a world of severe mental illness without any diagnosis.
With the precision of an investigative journalist, Cahalan recreates what happened to her in the New York Times-bestselling memoir, Brain on Fire, My Month of Madness. There she describes the terror of what it’s like to be a patient without a medical diagnosis. A human being lost in a sea of clinical maybes. Violent, psychotic and considered a flight risk, she was all but a shadow of her former self.
Luckily, she did eventually find clinical clarity. The diagnosis: anti-NMDA receptor autoimmune encephalitis - a disease only discovered in 2007.
Cahalan’s back at work now at the New York Post. She’s writing book reviews, science and health articles, all with a new perspective. In this 1:2:1 podcast and Stanford Medicine magazine piece, I asked her if she was a different person now, and she told me you can’t go through something like this and not be. “It has changed everything."
Previously: Stanford Medicine magazine traverses the immune system
Illustration by Joe Ciardiello
