It looked very much like the beginnings of a schizophrenic or bipolar episode,” said Christopher Kobet, a fourth-year neurology resident at University Hospital who helped pinpoint Echols’ problem.
But the real culprit wasn’t in her head: It was a tiny tumor on her left ovary.
The tumor was a teratoma, a freakish, but not uncommon, conglomeration of basic cells growing out of control. Some teratomas, if they’re big enough, even contain eyeballs or tiny feet.
Echols’ body recognized the tumor as an invader, and developed antibodies against it, just like it would develop antibodies against a cold virus or a form of pollen she might be allergic to.
Those antibodies attacked certain neurochemicals in the brain, triggering the encephalitis and the hallucinations…
“When I first saw it, I thought it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, what we call a zebra,” Kobet said. “But it’s not rare at all.”
Now that doctors know it exists and how to test for it, more cases are cropping up.
The implications of not making the right diagnosis are frightening.
“How many women, as recently as the 1950s and 1960s, were institutionalized with this because people thought they were schizophrenic?” Richards asked.

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Nightmarish tumor took her to brink

I am so enthralled with this story right now! The implications of this are so amazing/horrifying. In addition to the already established gendered/cultural nature of mental health this seems to add a really interesting layer of possibility to psychiatry. Psychiatry is so quick to diagnose mental illness as diseases that are brain diseases but what about the idea that you can have a disease with an identifiable biochemical process (in a non brain part of the body) that mimics what we think of as brain-pathology? NEAT!

I am also fairly impressed that the head of gyno-onc managed to even consider the societal ramifications of this when talking to the reporter.