Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness

by Susannah Cahalan

was a slave to the machinations of my aberrant brain. We are, in the end, a sum of our parts, and when the body fails, all the virtues we hold dear go with it.

“No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness,” Aristotle said.

Sometimes I have to remind myself that the things you read here actually happened to me. My relationship with that time is distanced from the decade I’ve spent retreading this slippery territory, conjuring up these memories and destroying them, again and again, like a necromancer. Once after a conference, a fellow presenter shared some critical feedback. “You are too removed,” she said. “You need to have more feeling.” I got what she was saying. I was treating my story as a clinician would, but it was the only authentic way. I was removed. I had to be—my brain had protected me from remembering too much. This self-protection only allows me to feel through the eyes of others.