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Cahalan’s own life gave her a subject most journalists never stumble into: she was 24, a New York Post reporter, when she began having seizures and psychotic episodes that doctors initially diagnosed as bipolar disorder or the effects of overwork. It took a rare specialist to identify an autoimmune disease attacking her brain — and to save her. She has spent her career since writing, with real rigor, about the places where psychiatry gets the line between mental illness and physical disease wrong.
By Lisanne Swart · 2 books · Memoir · Investigative Journalism · Investigative Journalism · Updated August 2026
Memoir · MedicalOn my shelf
Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness
Cahalan’s account of the month in 2009 when she descended into psychosis, seizures, and catatonia so severe she was nearly committed to a psychiatric ward — before a doctor identified anti-NMDA-receptor encephalitis, a rare autoimmune disease in which the body attacks its own brain. She reconstructs the month largely from hospital footage and other people’s accounts, since she has almost no memory of it herself.
A precise, reported memoir about the exact point where psychiatry and neurology fail to talk to each other, and how close she came to being permanently misdiagnosed as mentally ill rather than physically sick. It reads like a mystery because, for the doctors involved, it genuinely was one.
Investigative · Psychiatry
The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness
Cahalan investigates the 1973 Rosenhan experiment — in which psychologist David Rosenhan and seven others faked a single symptom to get admitted to psychiatric hospitals, then acted normally, to test whether staff could tell the sane from the insane. The study reshaped psychiatry and helped drive deinstitutionalization. Cahalan’s own reporting turns up serious problems with Rosenhan’s data and honesty, complicating a story she initially set out to celebrate.
The book Cahalan didn’t expect to write — she went in planning to profile a hero of psychiatric reform and came out having to report on a possible fraud. That turn, and her honesty about it, is what makes The Great Pretender more than a straightforward history.
Where to start with Susannah Cahalan
If you have never read her
→ Start with Brain on Fire. It’s the more personal book, and the one that explains why she went on to investigate psychiatric diagnosis so relentlessly.
If you want the sharper piece of investigative work
→ The Great Pretender, where a planned profile turns into a real reckoning with a famous study’s flaws.
If the theme draws you — where medicine and psychiatry get it wrong
→ My best investigative journalism books list has more reporting in this vein.
