Susannah Cahalan

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

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

To hear the words 'autoimmune encephalitis' in a movie is amazing to me, and I'm so proud.

The brain is the black box: the final frontier.

Be your own advocate.

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.

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

I heart Scott Baio.

When you want to write well, wake up at 5 A.M.

To see my story turned into a movie is mind-blowing.

It's hard for me to hear about the things that I believed during my madness.

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.

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.

Read enough books on the body, and you'll find that reality is much stranger than any sci-fi series.

In Greek myth, a chimera is a creepy combination of lion, goat, dragon - in humans, chimeras are one person who contains two sets of DNA. That's right. One person comes up in tests as two different people.

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.

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

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.

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.

Hormones get no respect. We think of them as the elusive chemicals that make us a bit moody, but these magical little molecules do so much more.

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.

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

If an autoimmune disease can create symptoms that look exactly like schizophrenia, that raises the question, what is schizophrenia? And are there forms of schizophrenia that are caused by other types of autoimmune disease?

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.