by Techeditor (Romeo, Michigan): How can a smart and industrious person suddenly be crazy? There are several possibilities, but Susannah Cahalan was lucky enough to be in the right place with the right doctors at the right time. They fixed her. How many other people who were put in psychiatric wards and institutions might also have been fixed if they were in the right place with the right doctors at the right time?

This is what Cahalan asks in BRAIN ON FIRE, her book that examines what happened to her when she was a 24-year-old writer for THE NEW YORK POST, living in an apartment with her cat in Hell’s Kitchen, and dating a guy she used to work with (who I fell in love with).

After days with indications that something was wrong with her, Cahalan went to the hospital, where she really did go crazy. She went through test after test while doctors tried to discover whether her state of mind had some physical cause. It did, and now they had a name for it: anti-NMDA-receptor autoimmune encephalitis.

No one knows what caused Cahalan’s disease, but her decent into madness was fast. And over her 28-day hospital stay a team of doctors discovered why and how they could fix her. BRAIN ON FIRE is a scientific thriller as Cahalan explains what happened.

This is truly a five-star book. Now I’m anxious to read her next one.

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