Reported personal story
Emily Gavigan — her parents saw a story on TV and recognised their daughter
What happened
In January 2009, Emily Gavigan was 19, a sophomore at the University of Scranton, when she slid into paranoia — convinced a truck was following her, warning her family that something terrible would happen to them. She spent time in different psychiatric facilities while medication after medication was tried without effect. She was also misdiagnosed with multiple sclerosis along the way.
What it looked like
Rambling, incoherent speech; numbness in her face and hands; a disappearance in which she drove from Pennsylvania to New Jersey with no money, through toll booths; seizures; and a progressive loss of speech — family video shows her unable to answer when her father asks her to say, "I love you, dad."
What the labs found
About a year after symptoms began, her parents saw Susannah Cahalan's story on NBC's "Today" show, recognised the picture, and urged Emily's doctors to test her for the same condition. They were initially dismissed — her father recalls a doctor telling them: "You two have to come to grips with the fact that you have a child with mental illness… You're not doing anybody any favors by grasping at these type of straws." They persisted, she was tested, and the diagnosis was autoimmune encephalitis — named by the Autoimmune Encephalitis Alliance, where her father now serves on the board, as anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis, in which the immune system attacks the brain. No antibody value for Emily herself has ever been published, so this entry claims none.
What changed
Her course was hard: a ventilator, seizures, and a blood clot in her brain following a new treatment. She recovered slowly from a wheelchair, and about a year after leaving hospital she was back figure skating. In November 2012 she appeared on "Today" alongside Cahalan, and she and her parents became advocates for earlier testing.
The test that told the story
Anti-NMDA receptor antibody testing (blood / spinal fluid).
Sources: CNN feature (syndicated), "Doctors thought she was psychotic, but her body was attacking her brain," based on interviews with Emily, her parents, her grandfather, and Drs. Najjar, Dalmau and Lennox; Autoimmune Encephalitis Alliance board biography for Bill Gavigan.