Preview

Summary Of The Book 'Brain On Fire: My Month Of Madness'

Satisfactory Essays
Open Document
Open Document
152 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Summary Of The Book 'Brain On Fire: My Month Of Madness'
This book, Brain on fire: My Month of Madness, is about the author Susannah Cahalan, a young woman who has a disease which no doctor could figure out and her journey to find a diagnosis. Susannah had many symptoms which ended up fundamentally killing her brain. Susannah gets put in a hospital after having another seizure and was labeled violent, psychotic, and a flight risk. Susannah had to stay in the hospital twenty-eight days before being released with the diagnosis, Anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis. Susannah has been treated and officially cured, but still struggling with memory loss,using her experience to help others. Susannahs purpose for writing the book is to inform readers about Anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis. I am confident this

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    In Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir, Lauren Slater described her personal early childhood story and young adulthood experiences of being an epileptic patient. She used significant metaphors in this book which required readers to reconsider what is real and what it the exaggerated part. Slater puts the idea up that she may be making her epileptic illness up. Slater was trying to tell the readers that her abnormal behavior was attributed by her epilepsy. However, in the last chapter of the book readers realized that she may never had epilepsy at all. Throughout her memoir, Slater is using epilepsy as a metaphor to give some facts that she was not able to write exactly, but our readers can find some private truth through the metaphor.…

    • 868 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Brain On Fire Book Report

    • 899 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Werner Doyle performed a brain biopsy on Susannah. The results confirmed the expected inflammation of her brain. They knew that she had an autoimmune disease, but they didn’t know what kind. In the meantime, they could begin treatment with intravenous steroids. A Dr. Dalmau was given her spinal fluid samples to test for Anti-NMDA-receptor autoimmune encephalitis. Dr. Dalmau had discovered this disease by studying four women with similar symptoms, including a high white blood cell count, delusions, memory problems, and teratomas in their ovaries. They also had similar antibodies targeting specific areas of the brain, such as the hippocampus. Susannah’s results came back positive, but thankfully, she did not have any teratomas. Because of the aggressive plan of IVIG treatments, steroids, and plasmapheresis, Susannah was discharged from the hospital after twenty-eight days. The doctors weren’t sure if Susannah would ever be completely herself again, but with checkups, therapy, and the treatments, they were…

    • 899 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Think Like A Freak Summary

    • 1340 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Think Like a Freak by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner is a book with the self-proclaimed purpose of engaging their readers to “retrain their brains.” They say that to think like a Freak is to think more productively, more creatively, and more rationally. The authors of this book were effective in accomplishing their purpose by engaging readers with various examples of interest and out-of-the-box thinking methods.…

    • 1340 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    The main character in Bullet in the Brain is a middle-aged book critic, who is especially “known for the weary elegant savagery with which he dispatched almost everything he reviewed” (1, L 5). You might even call him a grumpy old man, because basically that is what he is – but more about that subject later on.…

    • 1765 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Brain On Fire Analysis

    • 294 Words
    • 2 Pages

    The claim of Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by author Susannah Cahalan is that even ruthless illnesses can be overcome. This is shown when a nurse asks her mother “Has she always been so slow?”(Ch 24 pg 120); when her therapist questions how she’s feeling, “‘I'll ask you again. How do you feel out of 100?’… ‘100,’… My mom finally agreed with my own assessment.”…

    • 294 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Michael Foucault’s work, a renowned French philosopher, has greatly influenced the study of politics. He began his career as a Marxist and went on to research about sociologically and politically valuable data. In 1961, for his doctoral thesis, Foucault wrote his first major work called the “The History of Madness.” In this book, he gives a historical account of a constitution (as he calls it) of experiences of madness ranging from the 15th to the 19th century in Europe. It involves studying effects of differences in treatments given to mad people so as understand the phenomenon of madness. This book illustrates his thoughts and research on the relations between reason and power, institutions and power and authority and power (Hacking, 2004).…

    • 1516 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    "One tacit characteristic of psychiatric diagnosis is that it locates the sources of aberration within the individual and only rarely within the complex of stimuli that surrounds him. Consequently, behaviors that are stimulated by the environment are commonly misattributed to the patient's disorder," (On Being Sane in Insane Places p.272).…

    • 270 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    HISTORY: Ms. Copeland is a very pleasant 58-year-old white female who gives a history of several years of what she calls short-term memory problems. She has had no long-term deficits. No family history of dementia. Denies head injuries specifically the loss of consciousness although she did have a blow to the head four years ago. She has had no strokes, denies any current sensory or motor loss. She had a single seizure back about 30 years ago without recurrence. MRI scan done at that time was apparently negative.…

    • 502 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the literary criticism Madness and Misogyny in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Daniel Vitkus, he argues that generally the people that are in the ward are not actually insane, but just think differently from society. This different ideology and “reasoning” the patients have cause them to be rejected by the world around them and sent off to the mental institution (Vitkus 64). He also believes that society has this innate “hegemonic power” over everyone (Vitkus 65). The patients are then continually put down through rules and a loss of individuality in the ward. This lack of individuality and lack of power the patient's hold to express themselves and fulfill any of their wants and needs under the harsh rule of Nurse Ratched…

    • 1416 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    She started experiencing terrifying thoughts, nightmares and finding herself being paranoid whenever alone. Being a Psychiatrist, Caroline noticed herself become depressed as she believed she failed at her job for not being able to take her own advice. In the continuing months she began to experience symptoms of schizophrenia. At times she would go through strange hallucinations leaving in a state of delusion soon after. Unknown to her was also the unusual motor behavior of her brain. Once Caroline began to understand what all this meant she hides it from her husband, deciding she can fix it herself. Sadly it became worse, yet Caroline reused to acknowledge it. But the voices were unrelenting; she needed to keep them away so she got her prescribed drugs in secret. The treatment was slowly working; she thought it would all be okay. Until one night, Caroline and Emmett had been invited to dinner with the head neurosurgeon, a colleague of Emmett’s; it was running smoothly until voices came to light. Caroline wanted to scream and cry but to her this was too important, she fought against the merciless voices; acting as if she wasn’t being swallowed by the darkness. The voices ripped down the shields of her mind crushing her. They told her she didn’t…

    • 1784 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Best Essays

    In a world of technology and cities of massive population, in which strangers abound and close relationships are limited, society itself appears to be one large, emotionless machine, chugging along with no care whatsoever for the individuals that make up the huge entity. A proponent of rebellion against conformity himself, Ken Kesey expresses his views on the dehumanization of society in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest through vivid imagery. More than a novel about the struggles of the individual characters or a representation of the dilemma of insane versus sane, One Flew is a statement about the cause of insanity. Through the imagery in Chief Bromden’s narration, Kesey reveals that the dehumanization and conformity…

    • 2787 Words
    • 12 Pages
    Best Essays
  • Good Essays

    Oliver Sacks Awakening

    • 704 Words
    • 3 Pages

    The Moral Times. Awakening from Encephalitis lethargic – Would you want to know if you had lost 30 years of your life? June 11, 2011. Retrieved from http://themoraltimes.com/?=3212.…

    • 704 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Adhd Affects the Family

    • 2214 Words
    • 9 Pages

    In this periodical, the main idea is that labels don’t matter to children. Your children are still going to love you in the end. They may not understand why they act the way they do because of what is going on inside their brain’s or what the doctors are diagnosing them with. The labels matter to parents, but the parents want the labels to be correct. The parents do not want to take a chance of getting a wrong label and have their child take medicine that won’t help them get correct what is wrong in the neurological areas of the brain.…

    • 2214 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    MEDICAL HISTORY: Includes osteoarthritis, frequent urinary tract infections, hysterectomy 20 years ago, and some TMJ (The temporomandibular joint) problems. There is no history of TBI (traumatic brain injury) or LOC (Level of consciousness) but the patient reported that she had hit her head on the right side creating her TMJ problems. She denies ETOH (Ethanol) intake or smoking. Current medicines include: ibuprofen and Detrol. On admission to the MDC (Memory Diagnostic Center) the patients score on the MMSE was 3-D over 3-D and she was able to recall all three words. Clinical dementia rating was 1. Score on the geriatric depression scale was 12. For further information please refer to patients medical records. Ms. Copeland has a high school education with some college course work. She has worked for about 30-years as an editor. Currently she resides in her own home with her granddaughter with is sixteen. The patient’s granddaughter Jance, moved in about 3-years-ago and has had academic problems and reduced moderation. Ms. Copeland has tried counseling and the Date Counting Learning Center without much success secondary to Jance’s reduced communication and tendencies to sabotage own successes . Ms. Copeland is under considerable stress and does not know for sure if her problems with her memory have worsened. Ms. Copeland indicated that she has noticed memory problems…

    • 1622 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Roughly 1 in 26 people in America have epilepsy, but I never knew or cared until February 5th 2015. At the age of fifteen I hadn’t had a great life with my parents getting a divorce when I was eight; my older cousin dying in the tornado when i was 12; and my best friend dying at age fourteen. I also had a loving family that supported me through everything. Sometimes having a loving family doesn't keep away the bad things they try to protect use from. The evil that hit me was epilepsy and it hit my like an oncoming freight train.…

    • 223 Words
    • 1 Page
    Satisfactory Essays