Susannah Cahalan
Appearances
The Nerve with Maureen Callahan
The Real Jon Hamm is Not Who You Think, Plus What Happens When "Mean Girls" Grow Up and Get Meaner
That was the part he really took issue with, I think in the whole thing, but yeah.
The Nerve with Maureen Callahan
The Real Jon Hamm is Not Who You Think, Plus What Happens When "Mean Girls" Grow Up and Get Meaner
Oh my gosh, what a beautiful way of introducing that. That was the hope, really, when I was writing the book and thinking no one would ever read it. That was a hope of mine, that I would change the way women were treated when they would come in with an acutely psychotic episode. And that's, I mean, it's amazing to say, but it's true. I think because of
The Nerve with Maureen Callahan
The Real Jon Hamm is Not Who You Think, Plus What Happens When "Mean Girls" Grow Up and Get Meaner
my story and the kind of spreading the word about the condition, I think that women and a lot of children too, young girls, there are boys as well, but a smaller segment of the population. But now the illness that I had, which was an autoimmune encephalitis, that would be now on the rule out diagnosis list. Before, you know, 2009, when I was treated, that wouldn't be.
The Nerve with Maureen Callahan
The Real Jon Hamm is Not Who You Think, Plus What Happens When "Mean Girls" Grow Up and Get Meaner
So you would probably leave with a psychiatric diagnosis at the time and It was about 90 percent of people, adults would be diagnosed with schizophrenia presenting as I presented and children would be diagnosed with autism. So I think I really do think that that is not the case now, you know, in large part to the amazing amount of research that has happened, but in some part to my book as well.
The Nerve with Maureen Callahan
The Real Jon Hamm is Not Who You Think, Plus What Happens When "Mean Girls" Grow Up and Get Meaner
Absolutely. In fact, there are other cases of people who have been misdiagnosed for longer periods. I only was misdiagnosed for a month, really. And there was one case I did a lot of grand rounds and conversations about my, you know, what happened to me. Explain what grand rounds is to people who don't know. Typically, it's not a patient who leads them.
The Nerve with Maureen Callahan
The Real Jon Hamm is Not Who You Think, Plus What Happens When "Mean Girls" Grow Up and Get Meaner
It's usually doctors, but they usually talk about a condition or research that they're working on with other doctors or physicians in training. And I went around and spoke to many universities around the country about autoimmune encephalitis. And there was one really important and really tragic experience that I had at a psychiatric hospital where I was presenting on my case.
The Nerve with Maureen Callahan
The Real Jon Hamm is Not Who You Think, Plus What Happens When "Mean Girls" Grow Up and Get Meaner
And a physician came up to me after and said, we have a case here of a woman who has almost the same profile as you, presented the same. But the big difference between us was that she had been there for about two years. I followed up with him. He tested her, her spinal fluid and found out that, yes, indeed, she did have autoimmune encephalitis.
The Nerve with Maureen Callahan
The Real Jon Hamm is Not Who You Think, Plus What Happens When "Mean Girls" Grow Up and Get Meaner
But the big difference was that amount of time had a huge effect on her brain. And he actually used the words he said that she probably would not progress cognitively past a two year old. Oh, my God. I mean, people do die. And, you know, my physician and the physician who discovered the illness, Dr. Joseph Dalmau, believes that it has been around for as long as humankind has.
The Nerve with Maureen Callahan
The Real Jon Hamm is Not Who You Think, Plus What Happens When "Mean Girls" Grow Up and Get Meaner
So this was a misdiagnosis throughout history.
The Nerve with Maureen Callahan
The Real Jon Hamm is Not Who You Think, Plus What Happens When "Mean Girls" Grow Up and Get Meaner
Hmm.
The Nerve with Maureen Callahan
The Real Jon Hamm is Not Who You Think, Plus What Happens When "Mean Girls" Grow Up and Get Meaner
What a question. What a beautiful question. And so, I mean, I think you're onto something there. It's so hard for me to genuinely access the person I was before and compare that. But I do feel to talk in this kind of, you know, non-rationalist way, but when you cross a line, whether you want to call it another realm, another state of consciousness. You know, I had out-of-body experiences. Really?
The Nerve with Maureen Callahan
The Real Jon Hamm is Not Who You Think, Plus What Happens When "Mean Girls" Grow Up and Get Meaner
I saw myself from above. You did? I did. I saw myself on the television. I saw floating eyes looking at me. I mean, I had, at one point, I felt I was so powerful. I had the ability to kind of mess with time. I had really strange altered states, but profound altered states. And not all of them, most of them extremely negative, but not all of them.
The Nerve with Maureen Callahan
The Real Jon Hamm is Not Who You Think, Plus What Happens When "Mean Girls" Grow Up and Get Meaner
And I think just so much of what Brain on Fire was, was an urge and a desire to like harness it and to explain it. This can be explained through neuroscience. We can understand that this part of the brain can create hallucinations. So this is not me. It's something that happened to me. I think in a lot of ways, it was a way of like moving away from that kind of openness because It was scary.
The Nerve with Maureen Callahan
The Real Jon Hamm is Not Who You Think, Plus What Happens When "Mean Girls" Grow Up and Get Meaner
And I wanted to kind of assert my sanity in some way. Right. You know, we met at the New York Post tabloid news reporters. You want people to take you seriously? You know, so putting that book out was a way of saying, no, no, no, I'm good. I'm not mentally ill. I have this autoimmune disease and I'm back on solid ground.
The Nerve with Maureen Callahan
The Real Jon Hamm is Not Who You Think, Plus What Happens When "Mean Girls" Grow Up and Get Meaner
And then the year since I wrote another book about psychiatry and the limits there and the limits of medicine in general. I started becoming more and more open to, you know, a non-materialist, you know, this idea that there are things that we can't explain with the kind of rational world, that there are... kind of other realms and there are other ways of thinking and ways of being.
The Nerve with Maureen Callahan
The Real Jon Hamm is Not Who You Think, Plus What Happens When "Mean Girls" Grow Up and Get Meaner
And, you know, I, of course I like, I don't want my head to get, you know, I don't want my brain to fall out of my head by being too open. So I'm always careful not to go too far, but I think that you're, I think you're onto something. I think that experience changed me. And I think in that way of making me, you know, kind of touching down on this other, other possibilities out there.
The Nerve with Maureen Callahan
The Real Jon Hamm is Not Who You Think, Plus What Happens When "Mean Girls" Grow Up and Get Meaner
I think that that's undeniable for sure. Yeah.
The Nerve with Maureen Callahan
The Real Jon Hamm is Not Who You Think, Plus What Happens When "Mean Girls" Grow Up and Get Meaner
There's another part of the story. Remember what you found outside of your house?
The Nerve with Maureen Callahan
The Real Jon Hamm is Not Who You Think, Plus What Happens When "Mean Girls" Grow Up and Get Meaner
Oh, yeah. You know, Rosemary was, she was born in 1935. And she was born in St. Louis. And at the age of eight, she had a kind of, I would say, a mystical experience. She had something that opened her up very young. And I think that that really set the course of her life. What happened then kind of opened her up to what would come next. She was a seeker, and she wanted to believe.
The Nerve with Maureen Callahan
The Real Jon Hamm is Not Who You Think, Plus What Happens When "Mean Girls" Grow Up and Get Meaner
I think she wanted to believe in herself as a great character. I think she wanted to see herself in history. She thought very highly of herself in a lot of ways, but what was available to her at the time was very limited.
The Nerve with Maureen Callahan
The Real Jon Hamm is Not Who You Think, Plus What Happens When "Mean Girls" Grow Up and Get Meaner
She got married at 17, a very abusive relationship, left that husband, went off to New York, started modeling, no high school degree, and started to experiment with psychedelic drugs that were becoming very popular at the time and were not yet illegal. And in that, she really found that altered state, that connection with the kind of other world that she had found when she was eight years old.
The Nerve with Maureen Callahan
The Real Jon Hamm is Not Who You Think, Plus What Happens When "Mean Girls" Grow Up and Get Meaner
I had to learn to like him because I had to see it through her eyes. But I understand what you're saying completely.
The Nerve with Maureen Callahan
The Real Jon Hamm is Not Who You Think, Plus What Happens When "Mean Girls" Grow Up and Get Meaner
Yeah, I mean, he completely used her, especially when he escaped from prison. She masterminds that escape. She oversees it. She kind of gives up everything in her life for him, her identity, really. And at some point she decides it's too much and she leaves him and he gets arrested and he decides to cooperate with the federal government.
The Nerve with Maureen Callahan
The Real Jon Hamm is Not Who You Think, Plus What Happens When "Mean Girls" Grow Up and Get Meaner
And at that point, he actually hands over these letters, these love letters that they'd exchanged where they'd also talking code about the escape to basically hand her over to the federal government and try to kind of get them to kind of focus on her so that he could get off. He could get some time off of his jail sentence. And that was really an ultimate betrayal there.
The Nerve with Maureen Callahan
The Real Jon Hamm is Not Who You Think, Plus What Happens When "Mean Girls" Grow Up and Get Meaner
She was underground for 25 years. And she was living, you know, basically at the poverty line. She somehow still filed her taxes at various points. So I could see that she made about $12,000 a year running it in. Don't fuck with the IRS. Yeah, seriously. You can run from the feds, but not the IRS. With her fake name, she filed her taxes. And, you know, she really...
The Nerve with Maureen Callahan
The Real Jon Hamm is Not Who You Think, Plus What Happens When "Mean Girls" Grow Up and Get Meaner
And, you know, she was terrified of breaking the law in any way. I mean, she drove like 15 miles an hour everywhere. She was constantly looking at people thinking they recognized her. Imagine being that seen all the time, but also being completely unseen because no one really knows who you are. So it was a state of like being hypervigilant, but also invisible. And it was stressful.
The Nerve with Maureen Callahan
The Real Jon Hamm is Not Who You Think, Plus What Happens When "Mean Girls" Grow Up and Get Meaner
It was stressful. And, and also, I mean, she couldn't, she had no money and she was under, underground. She didn't have health, healthcare. So she couldn't go to a dentist, you know, and she died very young. She died at 66. And I think a great deal of that is due to the lack of healthcare and also the massive amounts of stress she was under when she was underground.
The Nerve with Maureen Callahan
The Real Jon Hamm is Not Who You Think, Plus What Happens When "Mean Girls" Grow Up and Get Meaner
That's beautiful. And I think that's so true. And I think, you know, she developed this armor around herself and she was a very open, we talk about openness, like she's you know, she was extremely open and the psychedelics opened her up even further.
The Nerve with Maureen Callahan
The Real Jon Hamm is Not Who You Think, Plus What Happens When "Mean Girls" Grow Up and Get Meaner
And when her husband turned on her, when the world really turned on her, she developed this armor as a way of protecting herself, but it wasn't a natural state. And I think in some ways it was very difficult for her to maintain that distance from people, but she, It had calloused over to the point where she really kind of forgot that magical quality that really defines her in her earlier years.
The Nerve with Maureen Callahan
The Real Jon Hamm is Not Who You Think, Plus What Happens When "Mean Girls" Grow Up and Get Meaner
She kind of had to let that go, which is very tragic.
The Nerve with Maureen Callahan
The Real Jon Hamm is Not Who You Think, Plus What Happens When "Mean Girls" Grow Up and Get Meaner
I am so proud of you and so excited for you.