Director Jennifer Brea exposes the personal pain of a rare disorder in the doc 'Unrest'

Jennifer Brea was a PhD candidate at Harvard University when her mind started to fail her. At age 28, she was already an accomplished academic, a graduate of Princeton who'd moved to Massachusetts to delve into the world of political economy and statistics.

But in the midst of her studies, she got sick. At first, she didn't think anything of the illness - it just seemed like a particularly bad case of the flu, one that came with a 104-degree fever. And yet long after the fever broke, she still felt like her brain was misfiring. She'd write one sentence of an email and then pass out for four hours. When she'd try to work on a paper, all the words would come out in the wrong order. She felt like she'd lost her grasp of the English language, substituting the word "hope" for something arbitrary, like "rake."

She went to a number of doctors, but none was able to get to