The film’s graphic depictions of these symptoms – hallucinations, delusions and aggression – shocked audiences, but were true. This film was based on Susannah’s book called “ Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness” after chronicling her experience in a 2009 New York Post report.Ībove is the movie poster for Netflix’s film “Brain On Fire”.Īnti-NMDAR encephalitis induces confusion, memory loss and seizures, which are often accompanied by altered consciousness and changes in blood pressure, heart rate and temperature, as portrayed in the film. The disorder was portrayed in the 2016 Netflix film Brain on Fire in which Susannah Cahalan was played by Chloe Grace Moretz. Josep Dalmau and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania first discovered anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis in 2007. This observation led to her getting diagnosed with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis, a very rare autoimmune disease that is almost undocumented in the medical literature. Najjar simply told her parents that her brain was on fire. It revealed that she had left-side spatial neglect and that the right side of her brain, which controls her left field of vision, was inflamed. She drew the circles and the numbers one to 12 all on the right-hand side of the clock, but the left-hand side was blank. He asked her to draw a clock on a piece of paper. Souhel Najjar, a Syrian-American neurologist, after a month in the hospital.

There were also seizures with “blood and foam” spurting from Cahalan’s mouth, indicating a neurological condition rather than mental illness.Ĭahalan was seen by Dr. Grandiosity, hysteria, fits of irrational anger, nonsensical utterances and flat catatonic-like effect were among the signs of the condition, which were mostly indistinguishable from one another throughout their early stages. She took $1 million worth of blood tests and brain scans that were inconclusive. Cahalan had the misfortune of becoming a one-of-a-kind and perplexing case: she was gravely ill and rapidly deteriorating, but her MRIs, brain scans and blood tests were all fine. “An interesting case” is something you don’t want to be to your doctor. Her symptoms alarmed her relatives and perplexed several doctors. Seizures, hallucinations, increasingly erratic actions and even catatonia started to plague her. She started to experience numbness, paranoia, light sensitivity and abnormal behavior in 2009. Susannah Cahalan, a 24-year-old reporter for the New York Post, knows what it’s like to be in that situation. Imagine being a journalist juggling several articles, conducting multiple interviews, learning intensely and more, just to have your life turned completely upside down in a matter of months. This image of a brain on fire depicts the inflammatory symptoms of this autoimmune disease. Brain on Fire: A disease almost undocumented in medical history

My brain on fire