Rosemary Woodruff Leary has been known only as the wife of Timothy Leary, the Harvard professor-turned-psychedelic high priest, whose jailbreak captivated the counterculture and whose life on the run with Rosemary inflamed the government. But Rosemary was more than a mere accessory. She was a beatnik, a psychonaut, and a true believer who tested the limits of her mind and the expectations for women of her time. Long overlooked by those who have venerated her husband, Rosemary spent her life on the forefront of the counterculture, working with Leary on his books and speeches, sewing his clothing, and shaping the media’s narrative about LSD. Ultimately, Rosemary sacrificed everything for the safety of her fellow psychedelic pioneers and the preservation of her husband’s legacy.

For centuries, doctors have struggled to define mental illness. In search of an answer, in the 1970s a Stanford psychologist named David Rosenhan and seven other people went undercover into asylums around America to test the legitimacy of psychiatry's labels. Forced to remain inside until they'd "proven" themselves sane, all eight emerged with alarming diagnoses and even more troubling stories of their treatment. Rosenhan's watershed study broke open the field of psychiatry, closing down institutions and changing mental health diagnosis forever. But as Susannah Cahalan's explosive new research shows, very little in this saga is exactly as it seems. What really happened behind those closed asylum doors, and what does it mean for our understanding of mental illness today?

BRAIN ON FIRE is the powerful account of Susannah Cahalan’s struggle to recapture her identity and to rediscover herself among the fragments left behind. Using all her considerable journalistic skills --- and building from hospital records and surveillance video, interviews with family and friends, and excerpts from the deeply moving journal her father kept during her illness --- she pieces together the story of a “lost month” of her life.