
Brain on Fire
My Month of Madness
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Narrated by:
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Susannah Cahalan
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By:
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Susannah Cahalan
About this listen
Includes a brand-new afterword, written and read by the author
Now a major motion picture starring Chloë Grace Moretz
An award-winning memoir and instant New York Times best seller that goes far beyond its riveting medical mystery, Brain on Fire is the powerful account of one woman’s struggle to recapture her identity.
When 24-year-old Susannah Cahalan woke up alone in a hospital room, strapped to her bed and unable to move or speak, she had no memory of how she’d gotten there. Days earlier, she had been on the threshold of a new, adult life: At the beginning of her first serious relationship and a promising career at a major New York newspaper. Now she was labeled violent, psychotic, a flight risk. What happened?
In a swift and breathtaking narrative, Susannah tells the astonishing true story of her descent into madness, her family’s inspiring faith in her, and the lifesaving diagnosis that nearly didn’t happen. “A fascinating look at the disease that...could have cost this vibrant, vital young woman her life” (People), Brain on Fire is an unforgettable exploration of memory and identity, faith and love, and a profoundly compelling tale of survival and perseverance that is destined to become a classic.
©2012 Susannah Cahalan (P)2020 Simon & Schuster AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
Vince Granata remembers standing in front of his suburban home in Connecticut the day his mother and father returned from the hospital with his three new siblings in tow. He had just finished scrawling their names in orange chalk on the driveway: Christopher, Timothy, and Elizabeth. Twenty-three years later, Vince was a thousand miles away when he received the news that would change his life - his younger brother, Tim, propelled by unchecked schizophrenia, had killed their mother in their childhood home.
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Brutal and Beautiful
- By 3dogknits on 07-14-21
By: Vince Granata
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Blood Orange Night
- My Journey to the Edge of Madness
- By: Melissa Bond
- Narrated by: Melissa Bond
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
As Melissa Bond raises her infant daughter and a special-needs one-year-old son, she suffers from unbearable insomnia, sleeping an hour or less each night. She loses her job as a journalist (a casualty of the 2008 recession), and her relationship with her husband grows distant. Her doctor casually prescribes benzodiazepines—a family of drugs that includes Xanax, Valium, Klonopin, Ativan—and increases her dosage regularly.
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This book is not a memoir of benzos
- By Mark Lawson on 04-27-24
By: Melissa Bond
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The Center Cannot Hold
- By: Elyn R. Saks
- Narrated by: Alma Cuervo
- Length: 12 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Professor of psychiatry Elyn R. Saks writes about her struggle with schizophrenia in this unflinching account of her mental illness. In The Center Cannot Hold, Saks draws readers into a nightmare world of medications, a misguided health-care system, and social stigmas. But she would not be defeated. With a strength and force of will that most can only imagine, Saks reclaimed her life and went on to achieve great success.
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Schizophrenia Inside Out
- By Pamela Harvey on 07-23-09
By: Elyn R. Saks
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The Collected Schizophrenias
- Essays
- By: Esmé Weijun Wang
- Narrated by: Esmé Weijun Wang
- Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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An intimate, moving book written with the immediacy and directness of one who still struggles with the effects of mental and chronic illness, The Collected Schizophrenias cuts right to the core. Schizophrenia is not a single unifying diagnosis, and Esmé Weijun Wang writes not just to her fellow members of the “collected schizophrenias” but to those who wish to understand it as well.
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Narration way too slow
- By Diane on 04-27-19
By: Esmé Weijun Wang
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Wasted
- A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia
- By: Marya Hornbacher
- Narrated by: Marya Hornbacher
- Length: 5 hrs and 25 mins
- Abridged
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Precociously intelligent, imaginative, energetic, and ambitious, Marya Hornbacher grew up in a comfortable middle-class American home. At the age of 5, she returned home from ballet class one day, put on an enormous sweater, curled up on her bed, and cried because she thought she was fat. By age 9, she was secretly bulimic, throwing up at home after school, while watching Brady Bunch reruns on television and munching Fritos. She added anorexia to her repertoire a few years later and took great pride in her ability to starve. Marya's story gathers intensity with each passing year. By the time she is in college and working for a wire news service in Washington D.C., she is in the grip of a bout of anorexia so horrifying that it will forever put to rest the romance of wasting away. Down to 52 pounds and counting, Marya becomes a battlefield: her powerful death instinct at war with the will to live. Why would a talented young girl go through the looking glass and slip into a netherworld where up is down, food is greed, and death is honor? Why enter into a love affair with hunger, drugs, sex, and death? Marya Hornbacher sustained both anorexia and bulimia through 5 lengthy hospitalizations, endless therapy, the loss of family, friends, jobs, and ultimately, any sense of what it means to be "normal." In this vivid, emotionally wrenching memoir, she recreates the experience and illuminates the tangle of personal, family, and cultural causes underlying eating disorders.
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Abridged=Horrible
- By Kelly on 05-05-13
By: Marya Hornbacher
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The Dark Side of Innocence
- Growing Up Bipolar
- By: Terri Cheney
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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The New York Times best-selling author blends a pitch-perfect childlike voice with keen adult observation as she shares her heartrending, groundbreaking insider's look into the fascinating and frightening world of childhood bipolar disorder.
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Eye opening
- By Anonymous User on 03-13-23
By: Terri Cheney
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Manic
- A Memoir
- By: Terri Cheney
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 6 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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On the outside, Terri Cheney was a highly successful, attractive Beverly Hills entertainment lawyer. But behind her seemingly flawless facade lay a dangerous secret - for the better part of her life, Cheney had been battling debilitating bipolar disorder and concealing a pharmacy's worth of prescriptions meant to stabilize her moods and make her "normal". In bursts of prose that mirror the devastating highs and extreme lows of her illness, Cheney describes her roller-coaster life with shocking honesty.
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Amazing
- By Kelly Ranasinghe on 04-26-18
By: Terri Cheney
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Unbearable Lightness
- A Story of Loss and Gain
- By: Portia de Rossi
- Narrated by: Portia de Rossi
- Length: 9 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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In this searing, unflinchingly honest book, Portia de Rossi captures the complex emotional truth of what it is like when food, weight, and body image take priority over every other human impulse or action. She recounts the elaborate rituals around eating that came to dominate hours of every day, from keeping her daily calorie intake below 300 to eating precisely measured amounts of food out of specific bowls and only with certain utensils. When this wasn’t enough, she resorted to purging and compulsive physical exercise, driving her body and spirit to the breaking point.
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For All Dieters, not just Anorexic Girls
- By Coghan on 02-20-13
By: Portia de Rossi
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Hallucinations
- By: Oliver Sacks
- Narrated by: Dan Woren, Oliver Sacks
- Length: 9 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Hallucinations don’t belong wholly to the insane. Much more commonly, they are linked to sensory deprivation, intoxication, illness, or injury. Here Dr. Sacks weaves together stories of his patients and of his own mind-altering experiences to illuminate what hallucinations tell us about the organization and structure of our brains, how they have influenced every culture’s folklore and art, and why the potential for hallucination is present in us all.
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Not Just Hallucinations
- By Pamela Harvey on 01-05-13
By: Oliver Sacks
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Sociopath
- A Memoir
- By: Patric Gagne Ph.D.
- Narrated by: Patric Gagne Ph.D.
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Story
Patric Gagne realized she made others uncomfortable before she started kindergarten. Something about her caused people to react in a way she didn’t understand. She suspected it was because she didn’t feel things the way other kids did. Emotions like fear, guilt, and empathy eluded her. For the most part, she felt nothing. And she didn’t like the way that “nothing” felt.
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Fascinating and Perfect Performance!
- By ScoobaRubio on 04-05-24
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The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: and Other Clinical Tales
- By: Oliver Sacks
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis, Oliver Sacks - introduction
- Length: 9 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; who are stricken with violent tics and grimaces or who shout involuntary obscenities; whose limbs have become alien; who have been dismissed as retarded yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents.
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I rarely stop reading a book halfway through...
- By Rusty on 09-04-15
By: Oliver Sacks
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The Glass Castle
- A Memoir
- By: Jeannette Walls
- Narrated by: Jeannette Walls
- Length: 10 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were both their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary Walls had four children. In the beginning, they lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Rex was a charismatic, brilliant man who, when sober, captured his children's imagination. Rose Mary painted and wrote and couldn't stand the responsibility of providing for her family; she called herself an "excitement addict."
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What's normal?
- By Kmrsy on 11-30-13
By: Jeannette Walls
What a wild ride!
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Brain on Fire 100%
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Eye opener!
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So well written and articulated!
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Brain food aflame
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Amazing
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What a book!
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Life changing
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Brain on Fire
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Powerful
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