New York Post Also a Winner in ‘Brain on Fire’, Susannah Cahalan Situation

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Let me start by saying that I’m not close to this situation at all. Like some of you, I read Brain on Fire when it came out and now, have seen the film on Netflix. And while I have first-hand experience with addiction and mental health issues, the story of Susannah Cahalan is something I’m looking at from afar.

Having said that, one part of the story that may be lost is how Cahalan’s employer, the New York Post, comes across.

Rather than fire Cahalan after she started to display troubled behavior — which we know now was because of her condition — they allowed her to take time away from the paper to address the issue. Most importantly, and impressively, though, is that when she had things back on track, they welcomed her back with open arms. To this day, she writes weekly for the Post. Sometimes, she writes mental health-related pieces. Mostly, however, she’s just a regular, talented journalist at one of the nation’s most prestigious newspapers.

Her latest piece, titled “The worst moment of my life is now a feature film”, offers an up-close look at her disease — known as anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis — and how surreal it’s been to see her episode turned into a feature film.

In looking at Cahalan’s work on the New York Post website, the major gap in bylines came between March and September of 2009. Lining it up with the timeline from her book, this is when her disease really started to take shape and when she was eventually diagnosed and hospitalized. And although, as she says in the aforementioned article, doctors believed she would “be lucky to regain 80 percent of my cognitive abilities”, she was able to fully recover. From there, it can’t be discounted how vital, I’m sure, the Post became in her integration back to day-to-day life.

Structure is super important when making the climb back from a horrible incident. The Post, fortunately, was there to help Cahalan and they deserve a big thumbs up.

Susannah Cahalan is now the “ace ambassador” for the disease that almost destroyed her in 2009.

https://twitter.com/encephalitis/status/1010100992971542529

You can read Brain on Fire here or watch it on Netflix.