The first neurologist I saw just thought I was partying too much, and he stuck by that claim even after my family insisted that he was wrong.

When my disease nearly destroyed me in 2009, my doctors thought I'd be lucky to regain 80 percent of my cognitive abilities. When I was at my sickest, I couldn't read or write. I could barely walk on my own or groom myself. The disease felled me physically and mentally - robbing me, briefly but intensely, of my wits, my sanity, my memory, my self.

My own medical history during my hospital stay was readily available to me through literally thousands of pages of medical records that outlined everything from my 'bowel releasing' schedule to the minute details of my brain biopsy procedure.

When 'Brain on Fire' premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2016, I fixated on inconsequential things like what dress I would wear and how much weight I wanted to lose. I lost my perspective.

History is filled with weird but true stories of social contagion - from dancing manias in the Middle Ages to nuns pretending to be cats in the 19th century to laughing epidemics of Tanzanian school girls in the 1960s.