Susannah Cahalan is an award-winning #1 New York Times bestselling author, journalist, and public speaker. She is best known for her memoir Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, which details her struggle with the rare autoimmune disease, anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis. Her 2012 memoir has sold over a million copies and was adapted into a Netflix original movie released in 2017, where Chloë Grace Moretz portrayed Cahalan.

In 2019, Cahalan published her second book, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness, which was shortlisted for the 2020 Royal Society’s Science Book Award and featured in various "Best-Of" lists. She has written for prestigious publications such as The New York Times, The New York Post, Elle, The New Scientist, and BBC’s Focus, along with academic journals like The Lancet and Biological Psychiatry.

Her work has significantly raised awareness for her brain disease, reducing the likelihood of misdiagnoses. NPR has praised her writing, noting, "Cahalan is nothing if not tenacious, and she perfectly tempers her brutal honesty with compassion and something like vulnerability."