His brain was inflamed. Suddenly the line between physical and mental health began to blur

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Last September, after Frank Parent fainted in the kitchen of his condo near Laval, Que., physicians suspected he'd had a seizure, or perhaps a blood clot in his brain. 

But after multiple tests, the 59-year-old learned a more unusual diagnosis: He was experiencing an encephalitis attack, the medical term for brain inflammation.

Parent suffered memory loss and spent close to a month in hospital recovering from the condition, which his medical team told him was likely caused by a viral infection — though efforts to test his blood for various pathogens didn't turn up any clear cause.

By early October, he felt back to normal and headed home. Then, in the weeks that followed, Parent began to feel a new — and more alarming — set of symptoms. 

Debilitating anxiety. Crushing depression. Severe panic attacks. A looming sense he'd gone to the "dark side," that his suffering was a burden on his wife and children. All of it hit him in waves.

Though he'd long experienced anxiety to some degree, it paled in comparison to the severity of the mental health issues the father of two was suddenly enduring.

"Take your worst anxiety attack, multiply it by a thousand," he recalled. 

"I was shivering, I couldn't control my emotions, it was all over the place, and obviously I was panicked by it."

Parent's harrowing experience of a rare brain condition, later manifesting as serious mental health symptoms, may seem extreme. But he's far from alone.

Various types of damage to the brain, whether through inflammation or an injury, can spark or flare up an array of psychiatric conditions, and clinicians say far more research and support is required to help people recover from the complex, long-lasting after-effects.

"It doesn't really matter whether it's encephalitis or a motor vehicle accident or brain tumours, it all presents, roughly — at the end of the day — the same," said Toronto-based neuropsychiatrist Dr. Chanth Seyone.

When it comes to encephalitis, new research out of Mexico revealed just how severe mental health struggles can get for certain patients.

The paper, published this week by the Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, looked at data from 120 patients who were suffering from a specific type of brain inflammation known as anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis, an autoimmune condition in which someone's antibodies attack certain receptors in the brain.