Episode details
Radio 4,3 mins
Brain on Fire
Available for over a year
In 2009 New York journalist Susannah Cahalan developed an extreme psychotic illness when her immune system began to direct its fire against her brain. At first doctors were clueless about the trigger for her mental illness and she was on the verge of being committed to psychiatric hospital. Then she was diagnosed with auto-immune encephalitis, a condition discovered just two years earlier by Dr Josep Dalmau at the University of Pennsylvania. Susannah was cured with treatments to control her immune system. Photo: Susannah Cahalan, © Susannah Cahalan
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