Our mission
Understanding the physical reality of encephalitis—and funding research that helps patients get diagnosed sooner and treated with dignity.
What is encephalitis?
Encephalitis means inflammation of the brain. It is a serious physical illness—not a weakness of character and not simply “in your head” in the dismissive sense people sometimes use.
It develops when the immune system mistakenly attacks healthy brain tissue, or when an infection triggers swelling inside the brain itself. Either way, the result is the same: real, measurable damage to the organ that governs thought, memory, perception, and movement.
What is anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis?
To understand why this book and this website exist, it helps to picture what can happen inside the nervous system—a hidden wildfire that standard psychiatric labels were never designed to extinguish.
Anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis is an autoimmune form of encephalitis. The body produces antibodies that attack NMDA receptors: the brain’s switches for memory, logic, perception, and behavior. When those receptors come under assault, neural chemistry erupts. The inflammation spreads fast.
The symptoms can arrive with frightening speed and look, from the outside, like a sudden psychiatric breakdown:
- Racing, intrusive thoughts and days without sleep
- Vivid visual, sensory, and auditory hallucinations
- Severe memory loss and disorienting confusion
- Broken or slurred speech and unpredictable changes in movement
Because the presentation mirrors a mental health emergency, patients are often misdiagnosed, placed in psychiatric containment, and given treatments that never touch the fire still burning in the brain. Lasting recovery depends on targeted medical care—calming the immune system and stopping the inflammation before it does more harm.
Our research mission
This condition is still widely misunderstood. Patients face long delays, wrong doors, and crushing isolation while the physical crisis continues.
Harmarni Love Books exists to help change that framework. A portion of every commercial sale of Psychic or Psychosis? The True Story of My Recovery is donated to global encephalitis research. When you support the book, you help fund work that aims to:
- Speed up diagnosis — train hospital triage teams to order the right blood tests early, so brain inflammation is caught before it is mistaken for a lifelong psychiatric label
- Challenge institutional stigma — shift how acute behavioral crises are seen and handled, so patients receive medical urgency, compassion, and dignity
- Improve treatment — advance neurological research toward safer, faster ways to quiet the autoimmune response and restore the nervous system
This is more than an author page. It is part of a movement to turn lived trauma into clearer science, sharper diagnosis, and hope for the next person who walks into an emergency room unable to explain what is happening inside their own mind.