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|date=November 2012
|website=http://susannahcahalan.com
|summary=This is the story of ''New York Post'' reporter Susannah Cahalan's mystery illness and her descent into madness, the deep soul-searching prompted when the disease called into question basic assumptions about the author's personality, and her slow road to recovery. At times moving, at times graphic, but always unflinchingly honest.
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|aznuk=1846147395
|aznus=1846147395
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One day Susannah Cahalan was a bright, outgoing tabloid reporter in New York, with a promising career ahead of her. Within weeks a mysterious illness reduced her to an incoherent shadow of her former self, struggling with basic tasks, and left doctors at one of the world's top medical centres baffled. In ''Brain on Fire'', Cahalan – now in the 'post-recovery' stage of her life – attempts to recapture the memories and events from the her 'month of madness' before diagnosis and cure.
In many ways it's a cathartic process (for the reader too, by the end), with Cahalan using her journalistic skills to piece together what happened from her own fragmented memory and interviews with doctors, friends and family. She also uses a collection of notebooks, journals and scribbles, some written by her in a time she has no recollection of at all. It feels as though Cahalan comes to terms with the disease that possessed her by researching it and trying to understand it, and finally by writing about it (she's a journalist, after all). By the final chapters, the reader is also much more informed about the symptoms and the workings of the human brain – without there ever being an information overload or any overly technical jargon.
These are very personal illnesses, as they concern and affect the personality of the sufferer, in fact they can alter the very essence of the patient's being, as Cahalan discovers. Her book describes a period when there was a different Susannah Cahalan, and the earlier woman has vanished, drowned under misfiring neurons and a rampaging immune system's debilitating effects.
A point raised again and again in ''Brain on Fire'' is that the brain is a very complicated organ, and we are nowhere near a complete understanding of it. Cahalan was only the 217th person diagnosed with NMDA-receptor autoimmune encephalitis since its discovery in 2007: how many people before then were treated for the wrong illness, mistreated, or even exorcised? Or, for that matter, how many people with mental health issues , in general , have been misunderstood?
Since her recovery – perhaps only temporary, as she knows – Cahalan has become involved with stories of other people being diagnosed with the same type of encephalitis, and is doing something to raise awareness of the condition. If you're interested in mental health, or in the human psyche, then this very personal exploration of both is bound to interest you.
If the medical-procedural aspect of this book appeals to you, then you might also like [[Diagnosis: Dispatches from the Frontlines of Medical Mysteries by Lisa Sanders]], which also has things in common with the TV show ''House, M.D.''
However, the focus in ''Brain on Fire'' is on the personal experience, not the medicine, and in that respect , it's like Alice Peterson's [[Another Alice by Alice Peterson|Another Alice]], which also features a young woman whose career and life are put on hold by a debilitating, unexpected disease.
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