The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: A Memoir of Madness and Recovery

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I really enjoy books about neuroscience and the brain. I think the book that really turned me on to the subject matter was Brain on Fire. Like that book, I read this one in two sittings, and I'm pretty sure it would have been one had it not been for life getting in the way. I really enjoyed the way Lipska was able to write about how she experienced her "insanity" from the angles of both the patient and the scientist (although I have a quibble about the author's perception of "madness" and feel the title of this book is misleading). I hadn't realized what parts of our brain do what, and the ripple effect irregularities can have on cognitive functions! We are wonderfully made! Kasia doesn't tell me until much later, but it deeply pained her to see me so disoriented, so altered, from the sharp-minded and accomplished person I used to be: her sharp-witted mother, the one who taught her math and logic as well as the importance of honesty and how to enjoy her life. She doesn't want our roles to change. She doesn't want to be a physician examining my symptoms and observing my strange new behaviors in an attempt to understand what's wrong. She wants her loving, fun, competent mama. Not this confused, angry, self-absorbed impostor.

This woman was a Polish immigrant and of the highest intellect. She ran her own brain study clinic, which makes what happened to her all the more ironic. She was a strong athlete and excelled at several activities. She cooked dinner every night for her family. But she lost all of that and more when she developed brain tumors. Her harrowing tale of treatment and recovery is told in this book. Lipska displays a robust optimism indicative of her strong-willed and competitive personality, referring to her cancer experience as a “bump in the road,” with a sense of blase unflappability. In our conversation, she made clear her desire to bring hope to others. Drawing from my experience with scientists and researchers, a population that is often guarded about hope and optimism in favor of evidence and conditional probabilities, I sensed there may be more beneath the surface. I asked Dr. Lipska more pointedly if bringing hope was a primary reason for her writing. When discussing her first husband’s diagnosis and eventual (1985) death from the very same cancer she would later fight, Lipska mentions that in the Poland of the time, cancer was highly stigmatized. A diagnosis of malignancy was viewed as a sign of weakness and a loss of control over one’s life. No cancer patient discussed his condition with friends, or even with family. One has the sense in reading her memoir that this kind of attitude continued to affect (or, maybe, “infect”) Lipska herself. She states that her typical response to emergencies is to throw herself “into a rational, organized plan, and grasp whatever control” she can. She also writes that (earlier in her life) after breast cancer treatment, she was up and about on the fourth day and that she never failed to cook a meal when undergoing chemotherapy. While receiving treatment for her brain tumours, she remained physically active; she even ran a five-kilometer race a few weeks after her first radiation treatment, placing fourth in her age group. I suppose I should be impressed by this, but I honestly found Lipska’s drive bizarre and even alarming at times.

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He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. An advance digital copy was provided by NetGalley and author Barbara K. Lipska for my honest review. The false distinction between physical and mental illness is fueling the crisis, costing lives and money. In addition to the deficits, her personality changed to being moody, bad-tempered and intolerant but given all she went through, how much of that was a product of the tumours altering her brain and how much the treatment and how much the stress and pressure of living through a second bout of cancer (she had previously had breast cancer and her first husband had died of the same type of cancer, melanoma, she had)?

AMANDA RIPLEY, New York Times bestselling author of The Smartest Kids in the World and The Unthinkable I am a neuroscientist. For my entire career, I have studied mental illness. My specialty is schizophrenia. In June 2015, without warning, my own mind took a strange and frightening turn. As a result of metastatic melanoma in my brain, I began a descent into mental illness that lasted about two months."—Barbara K. Lipska Such suffering and myriads of days and weeks and months in offices, hospitals and with dozens of advocates and possible optimal medicine associations and paths. Lipska survived and, with journalist Elaine McArdle, has written a book about her illness and recovery called The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Discovery. Very rarely do I get upset at anything I read. I did for some judgments made on this book by other reviewers. I wish I had not read them at all. Somehow I want to believe that people can be non-judgmental, tolerant. And see more than a class or an identity or ethnicity or a skin color.

Thanks to Netgalley, the authors (Barbara Lipska and Elaine McArdle) and the publisher (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) for a copy of the book. Lipska and I shared sighs and grunts, nonverbal signals mysteriously transmitted by telephone, to share a space of mutual understanding. We have permission to allow ourselves to enter this space because we are anchored by Lipska’s commitment to optimism.

It made for a detached read. Her access to medical facilities that most people in the world would never have access to and the way she expected that access was revolting, and she could not believe she had to wait for things. A whole hour in a waiting room! The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind gives a vividly drawn, perfectly imaged glimpse into what it's like to be the person with dementia, the person who is schizophrenic. And even, while she's on massive doses of steroids to control the swelling of her brain, the person in the grip of a manic psychotic break. The tumours in my brain became inflamed, and it was this subsequent swelling that made me lose my mind,” she says. “I was crazy for probably two months, but I didn’t realise it at the time, which is unfortunate, because if I had I would have realised that what was happening to me was amazing, incredible; I might have learned from it.” An even shorter fuse

In other words, the self is a fabrication of sorts, a compilation of memories more than an actual entity. “In our culture, we have a nice narrative that personality is stable. That is a fiction.” PDF / EPUB File Name: The_Neuroscientist_Who_Lost_Her_Mind_-_Barbara_K_Lipska.pdf, The_Neuroscientist_Who_Lost_Her_Mind_-_Barbara_K_Lipska.epub I'm very thankful to them, all of them, for this. You could say, this is what family's for, but I never expected to try them in this way. And I hope it will never happen again — that's my biggest worry. The neuroscientist wants the world to understand that mental illness is an organ malfunction, quite common and life threatening. In her book, she argues that we still judge brain malfunctions as if they are character deficits, reflections on a person’s value rather than the result of physical processes gone awry.