Sarah Nadav

This woman’s case is one of the many reasons I think psychiatry will be gone in 100 years. Her psychotic episode was due to anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis. It's an autoimmune condition where the immune system attacks NMDA receptors in the brain. She was put on a psych ward where they gave her high doses of antipsychotics while her condition deteriorated. Her family had to fight for the tests that revealed the illness. A psychotic episode should always be a medical emergency until proven otherwise. There should be a standard panel of tests for everything from B12 deficiency to encephalitis. A psychiatrist sent me home from an ER mid-heart attack because I presented with impending doom and stomach pain. I was diagnosed with psychosis and somatic delusions. It turned out that I had non-occlusive messenteric ischemia along with the heart attack. What makes me mad is that I may or may not have been in psychosis (I couldn’t eat, had lost 3 kilo that week and was in extreme pain) but the psychiatrist didn’t even treat the condition he thought I had- a sudden onset of psychosis as a medical emergency. It always is. The coming years, I hope families, friends and loved ones continue to push for medical workups and that people diagnosed with mental illness stop dying before their peers of treatable illnesses