Mental Health Biography

Comedian Sofie Hagen shares how she removed fatphobic influences from her daily life and found self-acceptance in a world where judgment and discrimination are rife. From shame and sex to airplane seats, love and getting stuck in public toilets, Sofie provides practical tips for listeners, drawing wisdom from other Fat Liberation champions along the way. Part memoir, part social commentary, Happy Fat is a funny, angry and impassioned look at how taking up space in a culture that is desperate to reduce you can be radical, emboldening and life-changing.

This Close to Happy is the rare, vividly personal account of what it feels like to suffer from clinical depression, written from a woman's perspective and informed by an acute understanding of the implications of this disease over a lifetime. Taking off from essays on depression she has written for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, Daphne Merkin casts her eye back to her beginnings to try to sort out the root causes of her affliction.

The author of the best-selling phenomenon The Reason I Jump returns with a unique memoir about life as a young adult with severe autism. With an introduction by David Mitchell, who translated this book with his wife, KA Yoshida, this extraordinary new work explores education, identity, family, society, and personal growth, opening a window into the mind of its nonverbal author and providing remarkable insights into autism in general.

Into the Gray Zone takes listeners to the edge of a dazzling, humbling frontier in our understanding of the brain: the so-called "gray zone" between full consciousness and brain death. People in this middle place have sustained traumatic brain injuries or are the victims of stroke or degenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Many are oblivious to the outside world, and their doctors believe they are incapable of thought.

How do you deal with those that break the law? If their aim is to evade you, how do you identify them? If their aim is to lie, how do you interview them? If they don't see their actions are wrong, how do you help them to successfully reform? Criminal psychology is the discipline which tackles these challenges head on. From the signals which give away when we’re lying to the psychological profiling of violent offenders, this exhaustive guide, written by the UK’s top experts, is the perfect introduction.

Stacy Pershall grew up as an overly intelligent, depressed, deeply strange girl in Prairie Grove, Arkansas, population 1,000. From her days as a 13-year-old Jesus freak through her eventual diagnosis of bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder, this spirited memoir chronicles Pershall's journey through hell and her struggle with the mental health care system.

In her groundbreaking debut essay collection, actress Lily Collins—Golden Globe-nominated star of Rules Don’t Apply, Mortal Instruments, and To the Bone—is opening a poignant, honest conversation about the things young women struggle with: body image, self-confidence, relationships, family, dating, and so much more. Lily shares her life and her own deepest secrets, underlining that every single one of us experiences pain and heartbreak. We all understand what it’s like to live in the light and in the dark. For Lily, it’s about making it through to the other side, where you love what you see in the mirror and where you embrace yourself just as you are. She's learned that all it takes is one person standing up and saying something for everyone else to realize they’re not alone. By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Lily’s honest voice will inspire you to be who you are and say what you feel. It’s time to claim your voice! It’s time to live your life unfiltered.

Bestselling author Leonard Shlain explores the life, art, and mind of Leonardo da Vinci, seeking to explain his singularity by looking at his achievements in art, science, psychology, and military strategy (yes), and then employing state of the art left-right brain scientific research to explain his universal genius. Shlain shows that no other person in human history has excelled in so many different areas as Da Vinci and he peels back the layers to explore the how and the why.

Considered to be the world’s foremost post-Jungian thinker, James Hillman is known as the founder of archetypal psychology and the author of more than 20 books, including the bestselling title The Soul’s Code. In The Making of a Psychologist, we follow Hillman from his youth in the heyday of Atlantic City, through post-war Paris and Dublin, travels in Africa and Kashmir, and onward to Zurich and the Jung Institute, which appointed him its first director of studies in 1960.

Patrick J. Kennedy, the former congressman and youngest child of Senator Ted Kennedy, details his personal and political battle with mental illness and addiction, exploring mental health care's history in the country alongside his and every family's private struggles. A Common Struggle weaves together Kennedy's private and professional narratives, echoing Kennedy's philosophy that for him, the personal is political and the political personal.

Anyone who has seen a child recover from a wound or a broken bone knows that kids are made to heal. Their bodies are more resilient, more adaptive, and far more able to withstand acute stress than adults'. In this inspiring memoir, Dr. Kurt Newman draws from his long experience as a pediatric surgeon working at one of our nation's top children's hospitals to make the case that children are more than miniature adults.

Russell Brand explores the idea of mentoring and shares what he's learned from the guidance of his own helpers, heroes and mentors. Could happiness lie in helping others and being open to accepting help yourself? Mentors - the follow-up to the New York Times best seller Recovery - describes the benefits of seeking and offering help.

Families are riddled with untold secrets. But Stephen Hinshaw never imagined that a profound secret was kept under lock and key for 18 years within his family - that his father's mysterious absences, for months at a time, resulted from serious mental illness and involuntary hospitalizations. From the moment his father revealed the truth, during Hinshaw's first spring break from college, he knew his life would change forever.

The debut of an important new literary voice: Marin Sardy's extraordinarily affecting, fiercely intelligent memoir unflinchingly traces the path of the schizophrenia that runs in her family. Against the starkly beautiful backdrop of Anchorage, Alaska, where the author grew up, Marin Sardy weaves a fearless account of the shapeless thief - the schizophrenia - that kept her mother immersed in a world of private delusion and later manifested in her brother, ultimately claiming his life.

In 1917, working alone in a remote Swiss asylum, psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach devised an experiment to probe the human mind: a set of 10 carefully designed inkblots. For years he had grappled with the theories of Freud and Jung while also absorbing the aesthetic movements of the day, from futurism to dadaism. A visual artist himself, Rorschach had come to believe that who we are is less a matter of what we say, as Freud thought, than what we see.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) reveals himself in this autobiography, which is simultaneously an account of the early history of psychoanalysis, to have been an outsider from the start. This fascinating account describes the journey of a young, Jewish doctor setting out to find his way in the world of professional medicine, his relationships and collaborations, friendships made and lost and his investigations into cocaine, hypnosis and the cathartic method which contributed to the evolution of his conceptual framework and practices.

In his early 20s, Mindy Greiling's son, Jim, was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder after experiencing delusions that demanded he kill his mother. At the time, and for more than a decade after, Greiling was a Minnesota state legislator who struggled, along with her husband, to navigate and improve the state's inadequate mental health system. Fix What You Can is an illuminating and frank account of caring for a person with a mental illness, told by a parent and advocate.

The Psychedelic Diaries marries traditional memoir to today’s conversations around sex, drugs, and current world events by following 24-year-old Kaitlin Tilotta’s adventures as a professional dominatrix on a deliberate five-month experimental psychedelic drug bender.

As long as she can remember, Maria Konnikova has been fascinated by the tension between luck and skill. But nothing could prepare Konnikova for the string of bad luck that befell her in 2015, when, in quick succession, she was diagnosed with a painful auto-immune disease, her beloved grandmother died in a tragic accident and unexpected layoffs for her mother and husband left the family in financial disarray.

This is Diablo's captivating fish-out-of-water story of her yearlong walk on the wild side, from quiet gentlemen's clubs to multilevel sex palaces and glassed-in peep shows. In witty prose she gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at this industry through a writer's keen eye, chronicling her descent into the skin trade and the effect it had on her self-image and her relationship with her now husband.