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

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Within months after her surgery, Lipska felt good enough to go skiing with her family and to resume her regular triathlon training, which includes swimming, cycling, and running. That Lipska didn’t die is remarkable enough in itself. More remarkable still is that she lived to write a compelling account of her experiences in her memoir The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: A Memoir of Madness and Recovery. It is the reference to “madness” that makes the book so very vivid because, before getting better, Lipska would indeed lose her grasp on her mental health. Three decades of having studied the maladaptive brain in others did little to prepare her for her own descent into, as she puts it, “crazy”. We have these thoughts about behaving properly — not yelling at our families and the loved ones. But I lost it. And I didn't realize it. In the tradition of My Stroke of Insight and Brain on Fire, this powerful memoir recounts Barbara Lipska's deadly brain cancer and explains its unforgettable lessons about the brain and mind.

She was angry, cranky, demanding, insistent, unreasonable, intolerant, and sometimes a danger to herself and others. She made bad decisions. One day, she tried to walk home alone from a supermarket. She got lost, urinating on herself, eventually hitching a ride home to a house she couldn’t recognize or point out to the driver. She was mean to her beloved grandkids, and rude to medical personnel who tried to help her. She saw menace in situations that were non-threatening, and missed the real dangers of insisting on doing the things she’d always done, like driving. After Lipska was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2015, she became someone else—and not someone she liked.Este o experiență extraordinară să-ți dai seama că tot ce ține de o ființă umană îți poate sta în palme." Generally Lipska’s husband, children, and grandchildren are presented quite stereotypically in her book. Her grandsons are adorable; her son, tall and handsome; and her daughter is beautiful and intelligent. I found myself occasionally wondering how Lipska, clearly a high-achieving Type-A personality, would manage if she had to describe children who were not athletic high achievers like herself. I also wondered what the descriptions of family might have been like if they'd been written by a writer other than McArdle--one more sensitive to language and nuance, who could tease compelling details out of her subject.

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.

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor- Harvard trained brain scientist who suffers from a stroke and then writes about it The author was not mad, she had deficits more in line with loss of function rather than the peculiar function that comes from psychosis where people are operating from a different frame of reference. Her speciality is schizophrenia but I just couldn't see that she became anything like that or at least not like any I have known or whose books I have read. As the inflammation goes down and the tumors shrink away, she begins to remember all the strange things she went to while her brain was swollen and being pushed on by tumors. She realizes she has lived through a situation very like schizophrenia, proving that mental illness can be created by physical stresses on the brain. Written in an easy to understand format this book provides greater insight into the essential role performed by the frontal cortex and the effect on family. It also helped me understand a little about my own mind and reinforced what an amazing organ it is.

We are not sure, still, why it worked, but we believe that all the drugs worked in concert,” she says, adding that similar trials are being conducted now with other patients, and that brain surgeons the world over are keen to learn the results. Competing again Creierul ne fascinează cu complexitatea lui și cu misterele pe care le ascunde. Tot ce visăm, credem, simțim și facem - tot ceea ce ne face oameni - vine de la emisferele cerebrale. Noi suntem creierul nostru. Este înspăimântător ca mintea să nu mai funcționeze din cauza bolii sau a îmbătrânirii și să pierdem ce ne este mai drag: persoana noastră.''What was even more surprising to me was how her family - Polish scientists who had immigrated to the US 25 years earlier (her personal family story is fascinating without surviving two cancers - she also had breast cancer earlier ) - also failed to be alarmed by her increasing anger and frustration, her forgetting how to cook her favorite meals, and eventually even do simple math - until she had progressed significantly. One interesting side to her impaired frontal-temporal function was a loss of emotion - she didn't seem to care one bit about the fact that she was dying. She recalls feeling pretty happy most days, and completely unconcerned. That's encouraging to me actually.

Which brings us to Lipska’s point. We assume there’s a certain type of person who loses their mind. In fact, it could happen to anyone, for any number of reasons that we don’t even know yet. And because the brain and its behavioral manifestations are so mysterious, and because we are so ignorant of it, we are afraid and ashamed of its power to destroy us. After initial surgery, her treatment consisted of, first, targeted radiotherapy aimed at damaging the small tumors before her treating physician administered an immunotherapy agent to help her body’s immune system seek and destroy the damaged and vulnerable tumor cells. The immunotherapy protocol was available to Lipska through her enrollment in a clinical trial. Dr. Barbara Lipska dedicated her life to neuroscience and ended up raging a personal battle with her own brain. As a neuroscientist her specialty was schizophrenia, but soon she experienced the very symptoms she studied. The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery follows her personal story of overcoming melanoma that metastasized to the brain. She reminds us that mental illness is a brain disease and provides a blend of brain awareness and personal anecdotes to educate the reader. According to Dr. Thomas R. Insel, former National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) director, when speaking of Lipska, “You have done something so important for people with serious mental illness who do not have an observable lesion. Not only have you reminded us all that mental illnesses are brain illnesses, you have reminded us to be hopeful. People recover.” It is her expertise, desire to help reduce stigma, and optimism that leaves a lasting mark on the reader. Lipska’s neuroscientific training buttresses her claims of personal identity: “we are our brains,” she writes in her book, but it’s noteworthy that Lipska does not leave all matters of who she is up to a biological explanation. Later in the memoir she asserts, “I insisted on being myself despite cancer and radiation.” The joy of Lipska’s tale is the interplay between empiricism and physiology and more abstract notions of self, identity, hope, will, and optimism. As someone living with glioblastoma (GBM), I took interest in Lipska’s experience with an immunotherapy trial to treat her metastatic brain cancer and her vivid descriptions of losing and recovering her sense of self through the ordeal.In this post, I summarize themes from our conversation, which emerge from her memoir, which I recently spent time reviewing. ‘We Have Nothing to Lose by Being Optimistic’Barbara Lipska is the director of the Human Brain Bank at the National Institute of Mental Health in Washington, D.C. An internationally recognized researcher in human brain development and mental illness, Dr. Lipska has a doctorate in Medical Sciences from the Medical School of Warsaw.