![]() ![]() ![]() The book, which came out in November, examines the history of psychiatry, focusing on the 1973 experiments by David Rosenhan in which eight healthy volunteers were admitted to psychiatric hospitals to test the validity of psychiatric diagnoses. He was right.Ĭahalan took up that cause in her new book, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness. ![]() Combined with the elevated white blood cell count in her spinal fluid, he believed mental illness wasn’t the cause of her symptoms, but instead that inflammation in her brain was behind them. The full picture never really fell into place until her neurologist asked her to draw a clock, and she drew all of the numbers on one side of the clock face instead of spreading them evenly around it. Another doctor told her she was experiencing alcohol withdrawal (though she barely drank). One doctor diagnosed her with bipolar disorder and put on psychiatric medication. During what she calls her “month of madness,” she hallucinated bedbugs, became paranoid that her boyfriend was cheating on her, had intense mood swings, and had multiple seizures, among other symptoms. In her memoir, she walks readers through her journey of medical misdiagnosis, much of which she doesn’t remember but has pieced together by interviewing her loved ones. That’s exactly what happened to Cahalan when she was 24 years old. ![]()
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