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Susannah Cahalan

Biography

Susannah Cahalan

Susannah Cahalan is the award-winning New York Times bestselling author of BRAIN ON FIRE: My Month of Madness, a memoir about her struggle with a rare autoimmune disease of the brain. She writes for the New York Post. Her work has also been featured in the New York Times, Scientific American Magazine, Glamour, Psychology Today and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn.

Susannah Cahalan

Books by Susannah Cahalan

The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness
by Susannah Cahalan - History, Nonfiction, Psychology

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: My Month of Madness
by Susannah Cahalan - Nonfiction

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.