Her writing has also appeared in the New York Times, and is frequently picked up by the Daily Mail, Gawker, Gothamist, AOL and Yahoo among other news aggregrator sites. Susannah Cahalan is a reporter on the New York Post, and the recipient of the 2010 Silurian Award of Excellence in Journalism for Feature Writing. Now a major motion picture starring Chloë Grace Moretz. a mesmerizing story', Mira Bartók, New York Times bestselling author of The Memory Palace Includes a brand-new afterword, written and read by the author. 'With eagle-eye precision and brutal honesty, Susannah Cahalan turns her journalistic gaze on herself as she bravely looks back on one of the most harrowing and unimaginable experiences one could ever face: the loss of mind, body and self. Written with passionate honesty and intelligence, Brain on Fire is a searingly personal yet universal book, which asks what happens when your identity is suddenly destroyed, and how you get it back. Cahalan takes readers inside this newly-discovered disease through the progress of her own harrowing journey, piecing it together using memories, journals, hospital videos and records.

His diagnosis of this little-known condition, thought to have been the real cause of devil-possessions through history, saved her life, and possibly the lives of many others. It is also the story of how one brilliant man, Syria-born Dr Najar, finally proved - using a simple pen and paper - that Susannah's psychotic behaviour was caused by a rare autoimmune disease attacking her brain. Its an unexpected gift of a book from one of Americas. This is Susannah's story of her terrifying descent into madness and the desperate hunt for a diagnosis, as, after dozens of tests and scans, baffled doctors concluded she should be confined in a psychiatric ward. Brain on Fire comes from a place of intense pain and unthinkable isolation, but finds redemption in Cahalans unflagging, defiant toughness. Everything she had taken for granted about her life, and who she was, was wiped out. Brain on Fire came out and blew everyone’s expectations away, including my own. Within weeks, she would be transformed into someone unrecognizable, descending into a state of acute psychosis, undergoing rages and convulsions, hallucinating that her father had murdered his wife that she could control time with her mind. A 10th anniversary edition of 'Brain on Fire' was recently released. Then one day she woke up in hospital, with no memory of what had happened or how she had got there. Susannah Cahalan was a happy, clever, healthy twenty-four-year old. When twenty-four-year-old Susannah Cahalan woke up alone in a hospital room. Though I would have moments of lucidity over the coming days and weeks, I would never again be the same person. : A captivating (The New York Times Book Review), award-winning memoir and instant New York Times bestseller that goes far beyond its riveting medical mystery, Brain on Fire is a powerful account of one woman’s struggle to recapture her identity. 'My first serious blackout marked the line between sanity and insanity. He is the rule.Brain on Fire is the stunning debut from journalist and author Susannah Cahalan, recounting the real-life horror story of how a sudden and mysterious illness put her on descent into a madness for which there seemed to be no cure He is a by-product of a defective system that forces neurologists to spend five minutes with X number of patients a day to maintain their bottom line. I was just a number to him (and if he saw thirty-five patients a day, as he told me, that means I was one of a very large number). Bailey is also, in some ways, a perfect example of what is wrong with medicine. While he may be an excellent doctor in many respects, Dr. In this candid and brave memoir, Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, Susannah Cahalan reveals how it feels to be trapped inside a mind that& rsquo s playing. When we live in a time when the rate of misdiagnoses has shown no improvement since the 1930s, the lesson here is that it’s important to always get a second opinion. Bailey, considered one of the best neurologists in the country, had never heard of it. Just a year later, that figure had doubled. “In the spring of 2009, I was the 217th person ever to be diagnosed with anti-NMDA-receptor autoimmune encephalitis.

Brain on fire author