Helen and Daniel Egger felt a burst of relief. Then they felt vindicated, and saddened. They’d encountered what seemed like tremendous resistance from some doctors. What happened to patients whose parents were less aggressive or had fewer resources—who didn’t happen to have a child psychiatrist in the family? “If I was not my son’s mother, with my connections, my son would be dead,” Helen told me. “That’s just horrifying.”

For Helen, given her background, the experience also raised a much larger question: If an autoimmune disorder of the brain could so closely resemble psychiatric illnesses, then what, really, were these illnesses?”

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/when-the-body-attacks-the-mind/485564/

RP The Atlantic