Welcome to Otherworld.
I'm your host, Jack Wagner.
In this episode, I will be interviewing journalist and author Susanna Cahalan.
She has written the books Brain on Fire, The Great Pretender, and most recently,
The Acid Queen, which is about Rosemary Leary, the wife of psychedelic pioneer Timothy Leary.
Susanna's first book, Brain on Fire, My Month of Madness is an autobiography,
and it details her battle with a rare form of encephalitis called anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis.
To put it very simply, in her early 20s,
Susanna was going about her normal life and suddenly descended into extreme psychosis.
She literally lost her mind for an entire month and spent most of that time hospitalized with a series of doctors giving her one false diagnosis after another,
ranging from mono to schizophrenia to some of them just saying that maybe she was partying too hard.
Eventually,
one doctor figured out that this rare autoimmune disease was causing her brain to become inflamed.
Not long after,
she woke up in a hospital bed on the road to recovery with limited memory of the previous month.
I thought this book was so fascinating and relevant to Otherworld.
Throughout history,
supernatural experiences have been dismissed as mental illness and the other way around.
There are so many more parallel themes between the book and the show.
For Susanna, this experience led to an interest in psychology and the human mind,