Psychological Issues In Brain On Fire

Hallucinations are another common symptom of a schizophrenic person. The protagonist at first "sees" (although she still knows that they are not real) people walking in the paths that she can see from her bedroom window. As her mental state worsens, however, she

Susannah Cahalan, a 24 year old, healthy and successful journalist for the New York post, experienced an acute onset of psychosis. Symptoms ranged from paranoia to seizures, which eventually led to a catatonic state. The onset of the female’s symptoms occurred when she became paranoid of a bed bug infestation in her home, yet after having her home exterminated there was no indication of bedbugs. Concern arose from her nonexistent appetite and severe insomniac behaviors. She began noticing her own erratic behaviors and shortly after experienced her first seizure episode. In search of an answer to reoccurring seizures she went to a physician who put her on Keppra (an antiseizure medication) and warned her the symptoms were due to stress and heavy drinking. The increasing paranoia developed into hallucinations, people plotting against her or speaking poorly of her. EEG and MRI results exhibited normal results; further indicating stress and alcohol withdraw. After being admitted to the NYU medical school EEG monitoring floor, examination showed tangential, disorganized, and temperamental behaviors. Several escape attempts later, placed Susannah in the more difficult patients category. Doctors suggested conditions such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and cancer. She exhibited abnormally high blood pressure pointing to extreme concern.

When Susannah told her mother, Rhona, that she self-diagnosed herself to be manic-depressive, both her mother and brother, James, immediately rejected the possibility. During Rhona and James’s phone call, James mention Susannah was very capable of handling stress. He stated, “That’s just not Susannah” and “Bipolar doesn’t make any sense to me” (p.53). The pattern of rejecting mental illness as a possible outcome seems to be a common response throughout the book. When Susannah confessed to her

It should have been a red flag when she was not getting any better and took multiple days off from work, that it was much more than the flu or mono. Aside from taking multiple days from work, the constant mood swings, as well as the constant paranoia feeling, should have also been a sign. Another sign should have been the fact that Susannah’s health began to decline rapidly shortly after suffering a seizure. It was a bit astonishing to see that the doctors didn’t take that into consideration or even ponder as to why that was happening to her. It wasn’t until Dr. Souhel Najjar decided to do a different type of test when they figured out what was wrong with

If you went through a month of madness, in which it took over twelve doctors to diagnose a disease for, how would you view American Healthcare? Susannah Cahalan, author of the book Brain on Fire, went through a month of madness fighting Anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis. This diagnosis was not reached for over a month after her first visit to a doctor. In this time, she saw over twelve doctors and received many misdiagnoses for her disease, such as mono. Due to her poor experience with American Healthcare, Susannah Cahalan portrays the state of American Healthcare as negative in her book, Brain on Fire.

illness that caused them to act so strange (L. Annika). They thought that the mental illness they

Brain on Fire was a book wrote by Susannah Cahalan this was her story of the rare disease she got, this made her co-workers, friends, and loved ones worried about her although she was one tough girl her actions were saying different. Cahalan was a beautiful twenty-four-year-old woman who lived in New York and was just a normal writer for the New York Post.

"Dr. John Todd noted [similar] hallucinations in [Alice in Wonderland] a variety of states... of epilepsy [and] schizophrenia" (Stewart). Psychiatrist Dr. John Todd connected the mind and symptoms of the main character Alice in Alice in Wonderland to the mental illness of Schizophrenia by looking at the common symptoms of people who suffer from this disease. Those symptoms are paralleled in Alice's trip to Wonderland through the hallucinations mentioned by Dr. Todd. Alice has many symptoms of a paranoid schizophrenic because of everything she does in Wonderland that is not normal to the world of reality. These strange things include shrinking and growing potions, talking animals and bugs, and the weird world around her. The strange occurrences are the initial key to figuring out her medical condition. Schizophrenia is a brain disorder that affects the way a person acts, thinks, and even their idea of reality. People with schizophrenia often have a different way of seeing the world. People who are commonly schizophrenic speak in strange or confusing ways, see things that don’t exist, and have unusual hallucinations. These hallucinations the characters experience are believed to follow the five senses. The five senses are touch, sight, sound, smell, and taste. The senses make the patient think the hallucinations are real when in reality the world only exist in the person's mind. Alice

In the book Brain On Fire by Susannah Cahalan, a New York Post reporter, gives a memoir of her time afflicted with an autoimmune disease. After she contracted the disease her life and personal identity, was forever changed. Cahalan details her symptoms leading up to her month's stay in the New York University Langone Medical Center, until she was finally the 213th person diagnosed with that disease. The number of patients diagnosed has greatly risen over time with the help of the nonprofit Autoimmune Encephalitis Alliance that Cahalan started.

In 1901, a fifty one year old woman named Frau Auguste D. was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Frankfurt, Germany. She had an unusual bunch of symptoms. While she had no history of prior psychiatric illness, her husband had noticed that Frau D. was becoming increasing paranoid, hallucinatory, agitated, disoriented, and having increasing difficulties with language functions and memory.

In the third section of The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, Oliver Sacks introduces two new patients: Mrs. O’C and Mrs. O’M. Sacks opens with the case of Mrs. O’C. One night, Mrs. O’C was dreaming about her childhood in Ireland and the music she would dance and sing to. When she woke up, she was still hearing the same song. At first, she thought that she was remembering her dream, but the song kept playing and it did not go away. As the day continued, she started to fear for her sanity and quickly went to see Dr. Sacks. Sacks performed an EEG test on her and found that whenever Mrs. O’C said she was experiencing a musical moment, her temporal lobe was hyperactive. This indicated to Sacks that she was experiencing an epileptic

The narrator was diagnosed by her husband as having “nervous depression-a slight hysterical tendency” (p. 648). This story shows her mind’s transition from minor symptoms to hallucinations, obsessive behavior, and paranoid tendencies. The hallucinations the narrator experiences adds a supernatural element to the story as she images a woman desperately trying

In two particular situations that happened during her time at McLean she experienced episodes of anxiety that she previously didn’t have before being institutionalized in the psychiatric hospital. Her first episode of anxiety was after a particularly tensed situation after another patient had left the hospital. As Susanna sat in a lounge chair looking at her hand she came to a thought that she didn’t have any bones in her hand and began to get really worried as she ruminated on the thought that she had no bones (Kaysen 102). She soon grew agitated as she questioned whether she in fact had bones and got really anxious about the idea and decided to peel her skin away to check (Kaysen 102). Therefore, she put her hand in her mouth and pierced her skin to see if she had any bones as she went into her crazed agitation. As Susanna states she began to get really nervous repeatedly questioning whether she had any bones as the blood ran down her wrist and suddenly she went into a panic attack where she didn’t feel safe and began hyperventilating on the thought the she had no bones (Kaysen 103). The next anxiety episode she faced was when she went to the dentist and was put under anesthesia. When she woke up from her procedure she got really anxious about how much time she lost being under the anesthesia. She began questioning the dentist repeatedly asking very loudly how much time she had lost and then later crying because no one would

The reason behind the expression of hysteric symptoms in a mental patient, such as Anna O., is from the affect of an unpleasant memory that is not brought to the conscious mind. The conflict of repression is the explanation for physical symptoms seen in hysteria. Storr wrote, “In many instances, the physical symptom expressed the patient’s feelings in symbolic fashion. Thus, constriction in the throat might express an inability to swallow an insult; or a pain in the region of the heart might signify that the patient’s heart has been metaphorically broken or damaged” (1989, p. 13). This explains the multiple symptoms that Anna O. expressed in her case.

It is commonly shown that lack of sleep, depression, anxiety, stress, certain medications, and alcohol are all common causes of memory loss. The most important thing to do here is to sleep well, and be happy. If using medications and it is shown that memory is decreasing ask about changing medications.