A different kind of normal you’re just born with. While Susannah clearly empathizes with those with mental illness, there’s a clear sense that she thinks that all mental illness is just an illness making you look mental and not actually maybe a different way of interacting with the world. The level of insight and analysis found in the first two parts was absent. The last third where she talks about her years of recovery and her life now was the weakest. Susannah recognizes how lucky she was to have people on her side advocating with the hospital for her, as well as to be in a city with such high-quality and cutting edge medical care. Since she herself doesn’t remember the worst of her sickness immediately prior to or during her hospitalization, she is able to take an impartial distance to the whole situation and report on how her divorced parents put aside their differences to care for her together, as well as look at how the medical system both cared for her but also almost missed her critical diagnosis. The second third of the book highlights her skills as an investigative journalist. To this day, no one knows if Susannah really had bed bugs or if hallucinating them was a first symptom of her illness. In the first third, Susannah recalls with such clarity the feeling of is this really happening or am I losing my mind? Specifically, the first thing that happens is she’s sure she has bed bugs but other people (including the exterminator) see no evidence of them. The first two thirds of the book are quite strong for different reasons. The third part covers the first part of her recovery time in the first year or so after she recovers her memory.

The second covers the time period of her illness that she actually can’t remember, and features her own investigative journalism into what happened during that time. Divided into three parts, the first establishes Susannah’s life when she came down with the illness and the first appearance of symptoms. Written by a journalist, the reader soon discovers this memoir is a survivor’s tale of brain encephalitis. Now she was labeled violent, psychotic, a flight risk. Days earlier, she had been on the threshold of a new, adult life: at the beginning of her first serious relationship and a promising career at a major New York newspaper. When twenty-four-year-old Susannah Cahalan woke up alone in a hospital room, strapped to her bed and unable to move or speak, she had no memory of how she’d gotten there.

Brain on fire cahalan