Susannah Cahalan was a healthy young woman who began experiencing severe symptoms like hallucinations. Doctors could not find a physical cause and assumed it was psychological, prescribing her antipsychotics. As her condition worsened, one doctor suggested committing her to a mental institution. However, under pressure from her parents to run more tests, another doctor discovered she had a rare autoimmune disease called Anti-NMDA Receptor Encephalitis attacking her brain. Susannah had been misdiagnosed due to an inability to identify the physical cause of her symptoms.

1. Brain on Fire
Psychotherapy

2. Psychotherapy
Treatment of Behavioral Disorders:
● insight Therapies
● Behavior Therapies
● Biomedical Therapies

3. Biomedical Therapy
● Antiaxiety Drugs
● Benzodiazepines
● Antipsychotics
● Antidepressants
● Tricyclics
● SSRIs
● MAOIs
● Mood Stabilizers

4. Media

5. Brain on Fire
Based on the true story of
Susannah Cahalan who
was prescribed
antipsychotics and almost
committed to a mental
asylum.

6. Susannah was a healthy young
woman with no behavioral or
phycological history. She began having
symptoms that quickly escalated to very
severe ones such as hallucinations. The
doctors could not find anything
physically wrong with her. After she
began having siezures, more tests were
done in the hospital with no results. She
was prescribed antipsychotics and one
doctor suggested that she be moved to
a mental hospital.

7. After running many more tests under
pressure from the parents, the doctors on
her case assumed that it was a
psychological disorder. According to all of
the tests, she was healthy. One of the
Doctors on her case admitted that “we
work and make decisions based on facts,
and at this point we don't have any.” As a
last resort one of the doctors asked Dr.
Souhel Najjar for his opinion. Thankfully,
he was able to diagnose her with a rare
disease called Anti-NMDA Receptor
Encephalitis, an autoimmune disease that
attacks the brain.

8. Connection

9. Psychotherapy and the misdiagnosis of Susannah
Because the Doctors that handled Susannah's rare case could not find anything
physically wrong with her, they assumed it was a psychological issue. She had been
prescribed Olanzaphine and was nearly committed to a mental institution. By
observation of her symptoms and behavior, Susannah would have appeared to be
schizophrenic. In one scene, she hears her father's fiance call her a “spoiled brat”
which triggers her to start throwing dishes and back herself into a corner cowering
from her own father. Despite her irratic behavior, the final diagnosis was not a
phycological disorder. Yet with assumed diagnosis she would have committed and
treated like a psychiatric patient.