If you wake up in hospital with not knowing how you arrived there and the events of the previous month are a complete and absolute mystery, you could be forgiven for thinking that you have recently enjoyed the mother of all alcoholic binges, or at least a protracted period of recreational drug use. Such is the predicament that journalist Susannah Cahalan finds herself in. Her doctors tended to believe she had been partying too hard as well, and let her know that her missing month had included violent outbursts and wild delusions which led them to believe she was suffering from some form of schizoaffective condition. Cahalan was frequently mis-diagnosed until her doctor, Dr Souhel Najjar, realizes that she was suffering from a. Rare auto-immune disease. The diagnosis was all the more incredible because the disease itself had been discovered just three years before Cahalan became ill. Having been diagnosed by herself and by a psychiatrist as having bipolar disorder, she learned that most people with the same auto-immune disease, anti-NDA receptor encephalitis, are either mis-diagnosed or never diagnosed at all. As she recovers the author reveals that as understanding of the encephalitis and its symptoms improves, more diagnoses are correctly made.
Anti-NMDA receptor antibody encephalitis is a type of brain inflammation that is potentially lethal but has a high success rate when it comes to treatment. It is caused when the immune system attacks NMDA receptors in the brain and causes behavioral changes and delusions. However because it has thisnin common with many other psychiatric disorders it is slow to be diagnosed and often misdiagnosed as something else.
The book was published by Free Press in 2012 and was widely acclaimed, particularly by psychiatry publications and organizations. Cahalan was praised for her brutal honesty about her own behavior and condition and also for her detailed research into her condition. The book was adapted into a movie in 2014 with a scheduled release date of 2017; it was scheduled to be directed by Charlize Theron and Cahalan herself, and stars Chloe Grace Moretz.
