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A review by dallas_shattuck
Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan
5.0
Wow, what an incredible choice for this month’s #buddyreadyourmemoirs pick!
Brain on Fire has been on my TBR for years, and I’m SO glad I finally read it. This memoir tells Cahalan’s “month of madness” when she began experiencing psychiatric symptoms and doctors could not figure out the cause. Eventually she was the 217th person diagnosed with a deadly brain inflammation and was able to recover.
This memoir was all-around phenomenal. The writing was straight-forward and engaging. At times I had to remind myself I was reading non-fiction, because the pacing of events reminded me of fiction reads.
I think one of the most eye-opening messages from this memoir is how privilege plays into medical care. Cahalan acknowledges this point several times and recognizes that if she didn’t have resources and support, she likely wouldn’t have been cured. It is very scary to think about how many people have been diagnosed with mental illness because they didn’t have the resources to find the actual physical illness, like rare brain inflammation, they actually suffered from. It’s devastating.
This is, for sure, a top memoir read for 2022. I can’t wait to discuss this one with our buddy read group at the end of the month!!
Brain on Fire has been on my TBR for years, and I’m SO glad I finally read it. This memoir tells Cahalan’s “month of madness” when she began experiencing psychiatric symptoms and doctors could not figure out the cause. Eventually she was the 217th person diagnosed with a deadly brain inflammation and was able to recover.
This memoir was all-around phenomenal. The writing was straight-forward and engaging. At times I had to remind myself I was reading non-fiction, because the pacing of events reminded me of fiction reads.
I think one of the most eye-opening messages from this memoir is how privilege plays into medical care. Cahalan acknowledges this point several times and recognizes that if she didn’t have resources and support, she likely wouldn’t have been cured. It is very scary to think about how many people have been diagnosed with mental illness because they didn’t have the resources to find the actual physical illness, like rare brain inflammation, they actually suffered from. It’s devastating.
This is, for sure, a top memoir read for 2022. I can’t wait to discuss this one with our buddy read group at the end of the month!!