When my memoir Saving Sammy was published in 2009, I wrote about the years when strep generated an autoimmune condition that attacked my son’s brain. The symptoms of that attack were incorrectly diagnosed as mental illness and those symptoms persisted until his infection was appropriately managed.  I also wrote that typically it take 20 years for major shifts in medicine and wanted my book to accelerate that schedule. One can only hope that the Post’s reporting will help, too.  Patients suffer and die while waiting for medicine to catch up to what the rest of us know to be true:  autoimmune conditions victimize the brain.  The first step that should be taken whenever a patient presents with any symptoms of mental illness should be to rule out the an underlying autoimmune reaction as the cause. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/06/01/schizophrenia-autoimmune-lupus-psychiatry/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F3a2cc41%2F6478c2ae49fef7411d00143d%2F5976c9f9ade4e26514b9c877%2F8%2F70%2F6478c2ae49fef7411d00143d&fbclid=IwAR2nGI4XL22X8o0gJS2zdHhv7j3gxqE00ikeO6ZHtNMFe8_WstVRnVqlXdc