All life is precious.  That is the stance of the Catholic Church.  This tenet is typically applied to abortion, and for good reason.  The life of an infant inside a mother’s womb, from the moment of its conception, is just as human and worthy of existence as any one of us.  This is just a part of the Church’s teachings on life and why I love to call myself Catholic.  Other aspects of Catholicism’s teachings on this matter include what to do when you find yourself in the care of a doctor.  One thing that becomes clear from watching Brain on Fire (2016) is that there is a culture of convenience for some medical professionals.  While watching it, it reminded me of the case of Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman who had been hospitalized for several years and in a coma.  After exhaustive court proceedings that captured national attention, the feeding tube keeping her alive was removed and she starved.  This was the wish of her former husband, Michael Schiavo, with whom the court sided over those of her Catholic parents, Mary and Robert Schindler.  Terri’s parents desired to continue caring for their daughter because, in keeping with the Faith’s belief, Terri was a whole person no matter her condition.  I am spoiling some of what I intend to discuss later, so I hope you continue to read how this all connects.

Despite my summary of Catholic positions on the sanctity of life, it is the apparently non-Christian or religious Susannah Cahalan (Chloë Grace Moretz) whose has the Brain on Fire.  This might seem like an obvious statement as when we first see her, she is thrashing about on a hospital bed.  She was not always in this condition.  As a twenty-one-year-old, up-and-coming reporter for the New York Post, everything is seemingly going her way.  She has the job she always dreamed of, Stephen (Thomas Mann), her musician boyfriend who loves her, and a big interview with a senator.  The signs that something is not right begin appearing early.  As she is celebrating her birthday with her family, during the singing of happy birthday, a glazed look comes over her face and she does not seem to absorb anything that is happening for several moments.  At work, her office mate that sits across from her, Margo (Jenny Slate), is doing a piece on a city-wide bed bug infestation.  One morning, Susannah wakes up to two dots on her arm that she thinks are bites, but she is the only one that can see them.  Increasingly, she becomes withdrawn from her family, friends, and co-workers, including Stephen, and loses track of time.  Her work takes on spottiness, and one story she turns in is illegible, angering her boss and editor, Richard (Tyler Perry).  At this point, everyone assumes that she is drinking and/or partying too hard, and Richard suggests that it could be drugs.  These assumptions become worse when she completely botches the meeting with the politician, which puts the reputation of the paper at risk.  With the rumors becoming louder, so too do the hallucinations for Susannah, auditorily and visually.  These peak right before she has a seizure while spending the night with Stephen.  He takes her to the hospital, but she remains adamant that this is not where she belongs.  From here, she begins self-diagnosing herself, telling various therapists that she is bi-polar because all the symptoms, to her, point to this being what is wrong with her.  We have all been there, have we not, particularly when desperately looking for answers?  Predictably, her efforts prove little help and her symptoms worsen.  Following a manic episode at work, Susannah’s mother, Rhona Nack (Carrie-Ann Moss), brings her daughter home to live with her and her husband.  Rhona insists that Susannah take her prescription, but the young woman instead turns defiant and violent.  Rhona turns to her husband, Tom Cahalan (Richard Armitage), for help, and Susannah goes to stay with him for a while.  Her violence and detachment from reality spiral more, with one dinner devolving into a panic attack with her believing her step-mother, Giselle (Jenn MacLean-Angus), is saying threatening things.  Having exhausted all their efforts at home, the family opts for hospitalization.  Their first physician, Dr. Samson (Vincent Gale), continues to insist that whatever it is that is going on with Susannah, it is of a psychiatric nature.  Susannah’s parents are equally convinced that it is something more.  They progress with this attitude during their daughter’s hospital stay as a battery of doctors examine Susannah in every conceivable way and can find nothing medically wrong with her.  As their confusion persists, Susannah goes from worse to catatonic, barely able to respond to anyone around her.  The team at the hospital make one more recommendation that Susannah be moved to a psychiatric facility.  As before, Rhona and Tom say no.  After this latest meeting, one of the doctors treating Susannah, Dr. Khan (Agam Darshi), goes to visit a specialist now teaching at a university, Dr. Souhel Najjar (Navid Negahban).  Though Dr. Najjar initially claims that he is just a teacher now, the uniqueness of Susannah’s case brings him to the hospital.  His different approach to Susannah yields a diagnosis called anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis.  Thankfully, Tom asks for this in layman’s terms, and it means that her body is attacking her brain, hence the title.  Because the disease is caught in the early stages, they are able to treat it.  As Susannah is released and on the road to recovery, she has to relearn many of the bodily functions we take for granted, like talking and walking.  Seven months later, though, she is back to work at the newspaper.  The film ends with Richard asking her to write a story about what she experienced.

In case it is not evident from anything I have said thus far about Brain on Fire, it is based on a true story.  It partly explains why it made me think of the Schiavo case.  The other half is the response of the family.  As alluded to in the synopsis, it is not clear that any of these people have a faith life.  Further, caring about a loved one suffering in this way is not the sole purview of Catholics.  What can be said is the way that Susannah’s parents and Stephen love and support her through the entire process is in keeping with Church doctrine on the sanctity of life.  Existence is not easy.  God did not make us for comfort.  He built us for greatness.  These sentiments echo Pope Benedict XVI’s words when he was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, and he said them in response to the ever-multiplying problems of the modern world.  These include what to do with people in dire medical situations.  To reiterate, the Church holds that everything must be done to ensure that life continues until natural death.  By definition, anything that is not a normal function of the body, i.e., a sickness or an injury that impairs us, would not constitute a “natural death.”  It also does not matter how much these difficulties affect us.  As long as there is a firing brain and heartbeat, that is a life that needs protecting.  You see the kind of determination needed to carry on these battles with Susannah’s parents.  In the midst of a month-long round of tests and more tests, Tom asks Rhona what they should next do.  She gives the right answer: that they keep going, on-and-on, until they find the solution they need.  The comfortable option would be to give up and hand Susannah over to a psychiatric hospital that, in fairness, would do their best to care for her, but would not be giving her the proper treatment.  Of course, that last assessment is based on hindsight since we know that it is not simply a mental health problem.  What Tom and Rhona do is they practice faith.  They have a belief that the solution will come, no matter how long it takes.  As followers of Christ, we can learn a lot from this attitude.  We can want something so bad and pray for it fervently, but when it does not come when we want it, we drift away.  Luckily, God does not drift away from us.  Hopefully, when something incredible happens in your life, be it a miracle like Susannah, you will recognize the source as God.

In looking at how Brain on Fire was received, I noticed that it got poor reviews from critics.  Talk about people who do not want to recognize divine intervention.  Hopefully, their assessments were not born of a culture of death that pushes so-called “medical problems” to the side.  As a Catholic, and thus not party to such thoughts, this film gets a strong recommendation.