A first-person investigation into psychosis, misdiagnosis, and identity
Dr. Mishra and Prof. Carpenter-Song with author Susannah Cahalan explore the intersection between lived experience and diagnosis and consider the implications for psychiatric care.
Advanced registration required:
Dartmouth Healthcare Foundations' Eric Eichler ’57 Foundations in Medicine & Humanities Seminar
The Great Pretenders: A first-person investigation into psychosis, misdiagnosis, and identity
In 2009, reporter Susannah Cahalan began hearing voices. Delusions followed, then full-blown hallucinations. During a harrowing month-long hospital stay, she was misdiagnosed with a severe mental illness—until doctors discovered the true cause: a newly identified form of autoimmune encephalitis. Transformed by her patient experience, Cahalan turned her journalistic lens on the modern foundations of psychiatric diagnosis, investigating the landmark anti-psychiatry experiment “On Being Sane in Insane Places.” But what she uncovered suggested that the study—long celebrated for exposing flaws in psychiatry—may itself have been built on shaky ground.
Join Dr. Manish K. Mishra & Prof. Elizabeth Carpenter-Song in conversation with author Susannah Cahalan as they explore the intersection between lived experience and diagnosis and consider the implications for psychiatric care.
Susannah Cahalan is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire, which has sold over a million copies and has been translated into more than twenty languages. Her second book, The Great Pretender, was shortlisted for the Royal Society's 2020 Science Book Prize. Her third book, The Acid Queen, a biography of Rosemary Woodruff Leary, a hidden voice of the American counterculture movement, came out in April.
