Essays Health

Early in her career, Katie Pryal learned that being a professor isn’t easy if your brain isn’t quite right. “I was a junior in college when I finally realized that I was different in a way that my medically inclined parents would call ‘clinical.’” In these deeply personal, fiery essays, Pryal tells her story of transformation that began the moment she chose to publicly disclose her own mental illness and leave her career in higher education to begin fighting for a better world for people with psychiatric disabilities.

We live in a world filled with noise—literal, emotional, digital, and internal. But what if the most powerful moments in life are found not in what’s spoken, but in what’s left unsaid? Sounds of Silence is an extraordinary exploration of the quiet spaces that shape our relationships, our spirituality, our memories, and even our sense of self. Across thirty deeply thoughtful chapters, Dr. Laski guides readers through the hidden terrain of silence—not as an absence, but as a presence all its own. You'll walk through the hush of a first kiss, the aching silence after a loss, the quiet ...

This book brings together Erich Fromm's basic statements on the application of psychoanalytic theory to social dynamics. At the same time, it offers an image of man consonant with the hopes of radical humanism. The Crisis of Psychoanalysis is a collection of nine brilliant essays. Although his work is deeply rooted in Freudian theory, Fromm further develops Freud's doctrines by including both social and ethical dimensions, and applies his discoveries and insights to address the problems we face in society at large.

It happens to us all: We think we’ve settled into an identity, a self, and then out of nowhere and with great force, the traces of our parents appear to us, in us - in mirrors, in gestures, in reaction and reactivity, at weddings and funerals, and in troubled thoughts that crouch in dark corners of our minds. In this masterful collection of new essays, the apple looks at the tree.

Luke Coutinho, coauthor of The Great Indian Diet, shows us that nothing parallels the power and impact that simple sustained lifestyle changes can have on a person who's struggling to lose excess weight or suffering from a chronic disease. The first part of the audiobook concentrates on the reason we get such diseases in the first place, while the second is filled with 62 astonishingly easy and extremely practicable changes that will have you feeling healthier and happier and achieving all your health goals without the rigor and hard work of a hardcore diet or fitness regime.

Esmé Weijun Wang was officially diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder in 2013, although the hallucinations and psychotic episodes had started years before that. In the midst of a high functioning life at Yale, Stanford and the literary world, she would find herself floored by an overwhelming terror that 'spread like blood', or convinced that she was dead, or that her friends were robots, or spiders were eating holes in her brain.

The essays in this collection represent Aleister Crowley's ideas and meditations on drugs. Part one explores Crowley's experiences with hashish and its uses in mystical rituals. Part two examines cocaine and looks at whether it should be regulated by law. Finally, part three delves into the sensuality of absinthe and its role in society.

This book helps you see, think, and feel back together those parts of yourself the Western mind reduced to rubble. If you feel integration to be unnatural, that’s your problem at a glance. I apologize that the day is dawning and there’s work we need to do, but hello. It’s time to wake up.

Susan Orlean has a full-on phobia of flying - an epic inconvenience for an author on a national book tour. With her trademark curiosity, she decides to rewire her thinking through hypnosis. Along the way, Susan discovers a lot about the unconscious mind, suggestibility, Mesmer, Freud, today’s cutting-edge treatments, and the dulling power of a sonorous voice. Most of all, she learns what it takes to close her eyes, open them again at thirty thousand feet, and finally be able to exhale. And you can too.

The intersection of motherhood and creative life is explored in these writings on mothering that turn the spotlight from the child to the mother herself. Here, in memoirs, testimonials, diaries, essays, and fiction, mothers describe firsthand the changes brought to their lives by pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering.

Fiction author Stephanie Haddad steps out of her comfort zone to talk openly and honestly about herself, her life, and her view on some regular old “life stuff.” This collection of 15 brief essays is designed for reflection and thought, but also just for fun. There’s also a bonus short story at the end—one a lot of parents should be able to relate to quite easily! Stephanie is not a health expert, life coach, or great thinker of her time—although that would be pretty fantastic. However, this book offers some of her thoughts, which will strike close to the heart for many women and ...

The notorious baby boomers - the largest age cohort in history - are approaching the end and starting to plan their final moves in the game of life. Now they are asking: What was that all about? Was it about acquiring things or changing the world? Was it about keeping all your marbles? Or is the only thing that counts after you're gone the reputation you leave behind?

In The Selfishness of Others, the essayist Kristin Dombek provides a clear-sighted account of how a rare clinical diagnosis became a fluid cultural phenomenon, a repository for our deepest fears about love, friendship, and family. She cuts through hysteria in search of the razor-thin line between pathology and common selfishness, writing with robust skepticism toward the prophets of NPD and genuine empathy for those who see themselves as its victims. And finally, she shares her own story in a candid effort to find a path away from the cycle of fear and blame.

These essays are ultimately designed for long term members of 12 step fellowships to help them be better sponsors and to help them be of service to others without allowing it to become their whole identity. In recovery, we get a chance to help others, but, in attempting to do so, we end up making mistakes, and coming face to face with our own characters defects. Service to other is a chance for us to exercise our own personal demons.

Oliver Sacks’ compassionate tales of people struggling to adapt to different neurological conditions have fundamentally changed the way we think of our own minds. In Musicophilia, he examines the powers of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians and everyday people - those struck by affliction, by unusual talent and even, in one case, by lightning - to show not only that music occupies more areas of our brain than language does but also that it can torment, calm, organise and heal.

Imagine you could give an essay entitled "How to Make Me Come" to a past, present or future sex partner, free of judgment or repercussion. What would you want them to know? In this book inspired by Emma Koenig's wildly popular website, a diverse collective of women do just that. Emma Koenig was inspired to answer this question after a truly frustrating sexual experience with a partner. As she says, "THE SIMPLEST VERSION OF THIS STORY DEVOID OF ALL IDENTIFYING DETAILS: He thought I had an orgasm. I hadn't."

Alongside their personal stories, the writers -decorated novelists, poets, and essayists - address the history of the C-section as well as its risks, social inequities, impact on the body, and psychological aftermath. My Caesarean is a heartfelt meditation, offering much-needed comfort through shared experience.

Gay culture has become a nightmare of consumerism, whether it's an endless quest for Absolut vodka, Diesel jeans, rainbow Hummers, pec implants, or Pottery Barn. Whatever happened to sexual flamboyance and gender liberation, an end to marriage, the military, and the nuclear family? As backrooms are shut down to make way for wedding vows, and gay sexual culture morphs into “straight-acting dudes hangin’ out”, what are the possibilities for a defiant faggotry that challenges the assimilationist norms of a corporate-cozy lifestyle?

The Good Story is an exchange between a writer with a long-standing interest in moral psychology and a psychotherapist with training in literary studies. Coetzee and Kurtz consider psychotherapy and its wider social context from different perspectives, but at the heart of both their approaches is a fascination with narrative. Working alone, the writer is in control of the story he or she tells.

With the necessary demise and death of antique cosmologies and traditional religious paradigms dependent on external deities and devils, the modern religious challenge involves two simultaneous sacred endeavors: to eulogize, bury, and grieve the theistic and monotheistic god-images and the religions dependent on them; and, secondly, to bring fresh imagination to the meanings of god and religion, which will satisfy both the modern mind and ancient soul.