07/23/2025
When Christine was nine years old, her mother, Mary, said, “Come here. I want to tell you a secret.” Mary said that a man she had known in medical school, a professor, was sending her messages about a plan to take her away and live in a mansion together. Mary leaned over and began separating strands of Christine’s hair, as if searching for lice. “Does he put listening devices in your hair?” Mary asked. “Does he ever ask you to say things to me?” Christine said, “I believed everything she said until she accused me of something that I knew wasn’t true.” Mary had always been tender and doting and practical. Christine said, “I just had this feeling in my body that she was not the same.”
After years in and out of psychiatric hospitals, in 2023, Mary collapsed in her bathroom and struggled to move. She was taken to a hospital in Brooklyn, where the doctors discovered that she had lymphoma, a sometimes fatal form of cancer. She began a treatment that combined chemotherapy with rituximab, a medication that targets antibodies involved in the body’s immune response. When her daughters visited her at the hospital, Mary responded to their questions with one-word answers. Her face had a vacant expression. They thought she was dying. Mary did, too.
Two months after beginning chemotherapy, Mary was moving a little more freely, and she had begun to carry on conversations. Her daughters noticed that her personality seemed different: she was calm, outgoing, and polite, and she often expressed gratitude. Christine had the same feeling in her body that she’d had when her mother first became ill—the sense that something at Mary’s core had changed. By the summer, Mary’s cancer was in remission. She hadn’t taken antipsychotics for months, and yet “her psychotic symptoms are gone,” a doctor wrote. Christine told the doctors, “She had a 20-year psychiatric history. Have you heard of this? Could any of her medications have caused this?” Rachel Aviv reports on the connection between autoimmune disorders and psychiatric conditions—and what happens when a mental disorder is suddenly cured: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/ISVtbv
