美国国家公共电台 NPR 'The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind' Returns From Madness

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SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Barbara K. Lipska got up one morning, as usual, in the spring of 2015, dyed her hair and went jogging in her suburban¹ Virginia neighborhood - all as usual. So why was her husband, Mirek, so alarmed to see her?

BARBARA K. LIPSKA: He was alarmed after I came back because I was there for a very long time running. I was lost in my own neighborhood. Not only that - the hair dye that I put in my hair that morning dripped down my neck and dried into these strange black rivulets². I looked like a monster when I came back home.

SIMON: Barbara K. Lipska, Ph.D., who joins us in our studios, is one of the world's preeminent³ researchers into the neuroscience of mental illness. Barbara K. Lipska has written a book with Elaine McArdle, "The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale Of Madness And Recovery." Thanks so much for being with us.

LIPSKA: It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

SIMON: What was happening inside your brain?

LIPSKA: I had tumors growing in my brain unbeknownst to anybody. And I had dramatic swelling⁴ and inflammation in my brain.

SIMON: Yeah. And at first, it was three tumors, but in time, it became quite a few more, didn't it?

LIPSKA: Altogether, I had around 20 tumors in my brain.

SIMON: Help us understand how the person your family knew and loved changed.

LIPSKA: I was changing very gradually from a loving mother, grandmother and wife into a kind of a heartless monster. I was yelling at my loving husband. I was yelling at my beloved grandsons and my children. I was behaving like a 2-year-old with a tantrum all the time. Why was it the case, you probably will ask.

SIMON: Yeah. Well, I mean, you've laid that out beautifully - why it was the case - in your book.

LIPSKA: Yes. I lost particular frontal cortex. It was swollen⁵. It was not functional⁶. And parietal cortex, so somewhere here behind my forehead. And these are the brain regions that regulate these high cognitive⁷ functions. These are the brain regions that make us human - that regulate how we dream, how we love, how we behave.

We have these thoughts about behaving properly - not yelling at our families and the loved ones, but I lost it, and I didn't realize it.

SIMON: And I'll note they still loved you and stayed with you.

LIPSKA: Which is believable, and I'm very thankful to them - all of them - for this. You could say this is what family's for, but I never expected to try them in this way. And I hope it will never happen again. It's my biggest worry.

SIMON: Do you know, scientifically, how you got better?

LIPSKA: We don't know exactly because I was given so many different treatments - radiation, immunotherapy, steroids for swelling and targeted therapy that directly target melanoma cells. It is probable that everything that I received helped to some extent, but my belief is that immunotherapy probably had the biggest effect.

But as I argued with my doctor, don't give me so many drugs because we'll never know what helped me. And he laughed at me - at the time of crisis, really - and said, you know what? I don't care. I don't care to know at this moment. If you are better, that's all what we care about. So it's a little bit of a spoiler for the book. I survived. I still...

SIMON: Well, just the fact that we're interviewing you kind of spoils that part of it, but that's all right. Yeah. But it must've taught you something about the brain that you've been studying all those years that you didn't know before.

LIPSKA: Yes. A very important message, which I knew all along, but it is like getting hard evidence for this. Mental illness is a brain disease. It is not some ephemeral thing, like a weak will or a lack of willpower. It has to be treated like any other disease - like the disease of heart or kidney or liver. And we don't know, still, what causes it. We know it is in the brain, and it's a physical change in the brain in mental people and in people like me that had tumors.

SIMON: How are you feeling now?

LIPSKA: I'm feeling great, although I'm not as powerful as I used to be, both in terms of my physical strength and emotions. I went through so much. My brain was assaulted with drugs, with radiation. I lost my eye - my vision in the left eye. Again, it happened in the brain, not in my eye. I lost some balance. I am a little disoriented spatially⁸, so I have, sometimes, trouble with maps and finding my places. But you know what? I'm alive.

(LAUGHTER)

LIPSKA: And that's all what counts. And I'm happy.

SIMON: Barbara K. Lipska, who's director of the Human Brain Collection Core at the National Institute of Mental Health. And her book, "The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale Of Madness And Recovery." Thanks so much for being with us. So glad you could.

LIPSKA: Thank you. Thank you so much.