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

Product Information

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. 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 began to exhibit paranoia and schizophrenia-like symptoms. She became disinhibited, completely unaware of her inappropriate behaviour. She got lost driving home from work, a journey she did every day. She couldn't remember things that had just happened to her. Small details like what she was having for breakfast became an obsession, but she ignored the fact that she was about to die. And she remembers every moment with absolute clarity.

Lipska is very fortunate to have a husband, Mirek, who's a cool-headed mathematician; a son, Witek, who's a neuroscientist; a daughter, Kasia, who's a physician; and a sister, Maria, who's a physicist and chief of therapy in the radiation oncology department at Boston's 'Brigham and Women's Hospital.' Primul soț al autoarei s-a îmbolnăvit de melanom, o formă de cancer care avea o rată de supraviețuire de doar câteva luni (la acea vreme). La scurt timp, căsnicia celor doi s-a răcit. De ce? Păi, cică omul trăia în negare, adică nu îi venea să creadă că va muri și s-a închis în el. Probabil trebuia să îi ducă flori, când venea de la chimioterapie. Așa că autoarea l-a înșelat. Nici măcar nu a avut decența de a se despărți de el înainte să se culce cu altul. Peste ani, s-a îmbolnăvit și ea de aceeași formă de cancer. Atât de scârbită am fost de atitudinea ei, încât i-am numit boala ,,karma". 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! 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. Barbara Lipska, a Polish-born neuroscientist who serves as director of the Human Brain Collection Core at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, is a long-time researcher in the field of schizophrenia. After being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2009 and melanoma in 2011, Lipska had gone on to enjoy good health and a very active lifestyle for several years. Although advised in 2011 that there was a 30% chance of the melanoma recurring, she was confident that she had beaten it. However, in 2015, the then sixty-three-year-old neuroscientist found herself gaining first-hand experience of the kind of cognitive dysfunction and paranoia seen in the people whose disease she'd studied. A number of brain tumours—metastases of the melanoma that had been removed from behind her ear a few years before—were the cause.

Select a format:

Her work as a researcher of brain illnesses enabled her to present a unique perspective on brain illness and dysfunction because she actually experienced it. In layman’s terms, Barbara explains how brain injury, illnesses, and age can affect a person’s personality, memory, behavior, and cognitive ability. Because there is so little known about the brain, Barbara’s experience adds to the knowledge in this area of research. 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. Her tenacity paid off. Despite some horrendous side effects – the mood swings alongside full-body rashes that, she was subsequently told, were as deadly as the cancer itself – she got better. The tumours disappeared; the madness subsided. Doctors were awed.

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. Book Genre: Autobiography, Biography, Biology, Health, Medical, Medicine, Memoir, Mental Health, Neuroscience, Nonfiction, Psychology, Science

The neuroscientist who lost her mind

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. I do not know or understand how her family missed what was going on with her, they are doctors who grew up in a household with a neuroscientist, you would think that that would give them a pretty good idea of what was normal and what was not. Perhaps it is because Barbara is highly controlling and they were scared shitless of her? Just a theory.