<p>Susannah Cahalan is an award-winning #1 <em>New York Times</em> best-selling author, journalist, and public speaker.</p><p>Her 2012 memoir <em>Brain on Fire</em>, which has sold over a million copies and was made into a Netflix original movie, one of its most-watched movies of 2016, chronicled her medical misdiagnosis and brief interface with the broken mental health system in America. In <em>Brain on Fire</em>, Cahalan recounts her frightening medical journey—fraught with unimaginable physical, emotional and mental obstacles—and her eventual triumph over a newly discovered autoimmune disease, thanks to a dedicated doctor and strength from her family.</p><p>In 2019, Cahalan published her second book <em>The Great Pretender</em>, which investigated the famous 1973 study “On Being Sane in Insane Places” by Stanford professor David Rosenhan, breaking news about the study and changing the way it is taught in classrooms around the world. <em>The Great Pretender</em> made a dazzling array of “Best Of” lists and was shortlisted for the 2020 Royal Society’s Science Book Award. NPR wrote that <em>The Great Pretender </em>"cements Cahalan's place in the ranks of the country's sharpest writers of nonfiction;" Nature called it an "engrossing, dismaying book;" and <em>Psychology Today </em>named it "the book of the decade." She has written for <em>The New York Times</em>, <em>The New York Post</em>, <em>The Atlantic</em>, <em>Elle</em>, <em>The New Scientist</em>, and BBC’s <em>Focus</em>, as well as academic journals <em>The Lancet</em> and <em>Biological Psychiatry</em>.</p><p>She has appeared on most top national news programs, including <em>Today</em>, <em>Fresh Air</em>, <em>All Things Considered</em>, and PBS’s <em>NOVA</em>. She lecturers at universities around the world—from Oxford University to UCLA to Columbia University—and regularly appears as a keynote speaker at conferences. In addition, she has been awarded several academic fellowships, most recently Yale University’s 2021 Poynter Fellowship in Journalism, Weill Cornell’s 2020 Richardson Seminar in the History of Psychiatry, and Columbia University’s 2020 Spitzer Memorial Lecture. She has taught narratives about mental health at New York University. She is currently working on her third book, a biography about a forgotten woman in the history of psychedelics, and lives in New Jersey with her husband, twins, and dog.</p>
Acclaimed journalist and #1 New York Times best-selling author of <em>Brain On Fire: My Month of Madness</em> and <em>The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness</em>
<ul><li><strong>Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness</strong></li><li>With exquisite detail and raw honesty, Susannah Cahalan reveals her personal journey from a promising young writer with a clean bill of health to a restrained hospital patient descending into madness. Employing her award-winning journalistic skill, Cahalan uncovers valuable insight into the human brain and incites important discussion around mental illness and the power of human resilience as she brings audiences into her battle to regain her mind, body and self.</li><li><strong>The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness</strong></li><li>Cahalan investigates the subject of the definition of mental illness in light of her psychiatric misdiagnosis. Doctors have struggled for centuries to define insanity–how do you diagnose it, how do you treat it, how do you even know what it is? In search of an answer, in the 1970s a Stanford psychologist named David Rosenhan and seven other people–sane, healthy, well-adjusted members of society–went undercover into asylums around America. Rosenhan’s watershed study broke open the field of psychiatry, closing down institutions and changing mental health diagnosis forever. But, as Cahalan’s explosive new research shows in this real-life detective story, very little in this saga is exactly as it seems. What really happened behind those closed asylum doors?</li></ul>