How Lyme Disease Messes With Your Mind

Among the Many Mystifying Symptoms of This Tick-borne Illness Is a Scary List of Mental-health Issues. Cosmo Investigates the Maddening Path of Destruction and the Best Ways to Stay Safe This Summer.

- Charlotte Lieberman

IT’S CALLED the Great Imitator for a reason. Lyme disease can hijack nerves and tissues all over your body, causing aches and pains nearly identical to a slew of other ailments—everything from migraines to the flu to arthritis. And as the infection rampages across the country— cases have shot up 115 percent since 2000—it’s also mimicking something else: life-altering mental illnesses.

It’s hard to believe that a tiny bug bite can incite panic attacks, déjà vu, disorientation, dizziness, and memory loss—a collection of symptoms experts now term neurolyme. For unknown reasons, neurolyme hits more women than men, with patients often suffering for years. Many times they’re misdiagnosed and treated for psychiatric disorders like depression, anxiety, bipolar, and schizophrenia, when, in reality, an early course of antibiotics could have been the cure.

The more attention Lyme gets, the more infections will be caught early—and the fewer women will be mistakenly treated for mood disorders. Recently, celebs like Bella Hadid, Ally Hilfiger, and Avril Lavigne have gone public with their Lyme struggles, and that’s a great start. Here, two Cosmo readers join them in speaking out, sharing what it’s like to be told you have a mental illness when you’re suffering from anything but, and experts sound off on how every woman can take crucial steps to outsmart this devastating illness.