Brain On Fire: My Month of Madness

"LB : There are so many books about the biological basis of behavior and disorders, but this is, I think, unique in many ways. Number one, this is a young woman just starting out in her career—so in terms of age, she’s 10 years or less from the students in our classes who are 17 or 18. Furthermore, she’s a writer. So: I’m very sorry that this happened to her, but I’m very glad that it happened to a writer because it makes it so much easier to read! It shows students what a psychotic break looks like. This is a woman who was incredibly successful as a journalist and then starts to have all of these hallucinations about bedbugs. Even a thorough cleaning of her apartment isn’t enough. And as it follows her downward trajectory, it puts a human face on mental illness—and in this case, a really successful face. When books focus solely on the homeless population or the violent schizophrenic population, I think that’s really misrepresentative. I don’t know that this is the most representative case, but it’s different to what you might hear in films or television programs that really over-emphasize the negative. “The optimal ratio for positive to negative emotions is 80:20” It also brings up interesting issues around treatment. Susannah is relatively well off, or her family is, and so they’re able to get her the care that she needs. So she acknowledges that she was really lucky and if her financial situation was different, the results in terms of her recovery would have been probably entirely different. She just came out with a new book called The Great Pretender: The Underground Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness in which she focuses on the flaws of the American mental health care system. I like the end of the book; she is able to make a full recovery, knowing that this may happen again in the future, but that it’s not a lost cause, that that there’s hope. The readability for me is probably the key element for students—and maybe for teachers as well—because it’s a book that you really can’t put down. If that’s what we need to make students readers, then I’m all for it."