This memoir is an enjoyable argument for looking at mental illness as part of the physical whole of the body. The link between mental illness, including schizophrenia and depression, and inflammation is getting stronger and stronger, but the difficulties in diagnosing inflammation in the first place and addressing the causes of this inflammation in the second place make it challenging for clinicians to put the physical and the mental together. The other challenge comes from the system being set up to keep mind and body entirely separate. Mental health professionals and medical professionals outside of the mental health field are both unlikely to look at biological causes of patient's mental symptoms. Just the fact that there's a division between mental health professionals and other medical professionals is both evidence of a continued erroneous assumption of Cartesian dualism and the reason that the chasm between mind and body is so difficult to bridge. 
 Cahalan herself describes a situation in which she was threatened by the medical staff with being moved from the neurology wing to a psychiatric hospital if she didn't straighten up. Only within a paradigm that believes that the mentally ill have control over their mental symptoms would a psychiatric hospital be considered punishment. 
 As long as we continue to look at mental symptoms as acting out or the fault of the patient, we're not going to be able to see the whole picture and effectively help people with mental illness in the way that we attempt to help those with illnesses we view as purely physical. Because many (perhaps most) physical complaints have a mental health component, it would also be reasonable to expect that by keeping a clinician from taking into account the complete picture, ignoring mental symptoms could also decrease the effectiveness of treatments for physical ailments. I'm not holding my breath for things to change, though, at least not within my lifetime. (Although I suppose if I held my breath long enough, that would almost guarantee there wouldn't be a change during my lifetime.)