In her memoir, Brain on Fire, Susannah Cahalan systematically challenges our very notion of mental illness with her journalistic counter narrative of her decent into an illness that consumed not only her body but her mind as well. It is precisely the structure of a journalistic prose that allows Cahalan to create a counter narrative that explores the tenuous connections between the ways our brains function and the diagnosis of mental illness. Despite Cahalan’s illness leaving her unable to recall months of memories, she pieces together her story from “[her] father’s journal from this period; snippets of video footage of [her]; and notebooks upon notebooks of recollections, consultations, and impressions”. I assert that using her journalistic talent, Cahalan creates an authoritative narrative that allows her to blur the lines between what is known about the causes of mental illness, and the public assumptions of mental illness. By showing the similarities of anti-NMDA-receptor autoimmune encephalitis and a mental illness, the reader is forced to look at the system we have in place to deal with mental illness and begin to question its validity. I believe that, even though Cahalan was not placed in an actual mental facility, her illness was viewed by many medical professionals as a manifestation of a mental disorder thereby giving her a vehicle to explore how mental illness is perceived. Cahalan chronicles the changes that not only happen in her body but her mind as well. The three-part structure that Cahalan employs in her book allows readers to fully digest her illness and diagnosis before she reveals her thoughts on medicine and the mental health system. While Cahalan is ultimately critical of the medical profession, it’s important to note that she credits her doctors for finding her diagnosis and her eventual recovery. 
I believe that Cahalan’s background in journalism automatically gives her a strong sense of authority that allows her to present her story as a counter narrative of the culture surrounding mental illness. It is because of this perceived authority that Cahalan’s memoir is in direct contradiction to the traditional narrative of mental illness as it is not proving that she is trustworthy but instead, she is presenting evidence that she was developing a mental illness. Cahalan’s choice to use a three-part chaptered structure sets a journalistic tone of integrity in her work but she also chooses to employ the use of italicized passages to visually denote information that she cannot substantiate. Often, Cahalan is using the italicized passages to describe thoughts she has that are almost primal in nature. These two techniques working together build a strong base for Cahalan to explore human mind and the fragility of its control over our bodies. Much in the way that reporter Nelly Bly gave her account of  her uncover stay at an asylum for the insane, Cahalan’s perceived mental illness grants her the knowledge of how people with mental disability and illness are received and treated by the medical profession. Bly “made no attempt to keep up the assumed role of insanity” and Cahalan was not aware that her illness was simulating mental illness. Neither woman was trying to appear they were in the throes of mental illness but both were treated as if they were. I assert that both Bly and Cahalan being reporters give their stories of encounters with medical profession not only authority but they are able to investigate those encounters with a journalistic eye.
