Quotes from Susannah Cahalan

I heart Scott Baio.

I shouldn't have been diagnosed as swiftly as I had been. I shouldn't have recovered as fully as I did. I shouldn't have been able to write a book that did as well as it did, and that book should never have been made into a movie. Yet, here I am.

It's hard to imagine a time when lobster pots weren't part of a well-equipped kitchen, but America's love affair with the two-clawed crustaceans didn't start until the 1800s.

Amy Adams is a lucky woman. Not only is she one of Hollywood's most talented actresses, with five Oscar nominations under her fashionable belt, she actually smells sexy.

History is filled with weird but true stories of social contagion - from dancing manias in the Middle Ages to nuns pretending to be cats in the 19th century to laughing epidemics of Tanzanian school girls in the 1960s.

I was the first person in NYU Medical Center's history to be diagnosed with NMDAR encephalitis.

Sometimes, Just when we need them, life wraps metaphors up in little bows for us. When you think all is lost, the things you need the most return unexpectedly.

The most dangerous age is 14. If you know any teenagers, this might not come as a surprise, but research has confirmed that risk-taking peaks during this exact moment in mid-adolescence.

Redheads feel hot and cold temperatures more severely than anyone else.

The brain is the black box: the final frontier.

I think people need to be comfortable questioning the authority of a doctor.

When my disease nearly destroyed me in 2009, my doctors thought I'd be lucky to regain 80 percent of my cognitive abilities. When I was at my sickest, I couldn't read or write. I could barely walk on my own or groom myself. The disease felled me physically and mentally - robbing me, briefly but intensely, of my wits, my sanity, my memory, my self.

My own medical history during my hospital stay was readily available to me through literally thousands of pages of medical records that outlined everything from my 'bowel releasing' schedule to the minute details of my brain biopsy procedure.

When 'Brain on Fire' premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2016, I fixated on inconsequential things like what dress I would wear and how much weight I wanted to lose. I lost my perspective.

Before I was a reporter, I worked at a record store in New Jersey.

I never imagined while going through this horrifying illness that I would write a book or that it could ever be a movie.

I believed that I could age people with my mind. If I looked at them, wrinkles would form, and if I looked away, they would suddenly, magically get younger.

I knew something was wrong; I was constantly tired, and I'd developed numbness on my left side. I'd also become paranoid that my boyfriend was cheating on me. I thought I was having a nervous breakdown. One psychiatrist told me I was bipolar.

In the world of online invitations, nothing is sacred. People will invite all 500 of their 'closest' friends to their birthday party - and 485 of those people will RSVP 'yes' without intending to show up.

My diagnosis had been discussed in almost every major medical journal, including the 'New England Journal of Medicine,' and 'The New York Times.'

We separate problems with the brain into neurological and psychiatric, and it's because it's stigmatised still. Mental illness is still stigmatised. Imagine if we treated people with cancer like that. Just because your personality changes and your behaviour changes, all of a sudden you are put in a different category.

For me, I think that there's a lot missing from the recovery or the post-diagnosis side of treating patients. Once the diagnosis is made, I feel that care drops off tremendously, even though it is precisely the time that a patient needs help the most, even if they are not verbalizing it.

I had to bring the idea of journalistic distance to writing about myself.

The true story of how my husband, Stephen, and I exchanged our first 'I love you's' - chronicled in my 2012 memoir 'Brain on Fire' - occurred deep in a hallucinatory psychotic episode outside a crowded Maplewood, NJ, restaurant.