Mental Health Biography

Sanjay Burman has had an accomplished life - he produced two feature films and two TV shows by the age of 24, and sold his high school to Pepsi for $1.2 million. This book showcases personal anecdotes and honest lessons he has learned through his failures and successes that can inspire others to persevere. People who want to go further in life but lack the confidence can be motivated to take risks, despite class, education, or lack of money.

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.

Are you ready to lead a life that is full of virtue, where you are able to lead a good life that isn't controlled by your emotions but still allows you to have empathy and feelings for others? Stoicism is an ancient thought that has stood the test of time and can provide you with the fulfilling life that you are looking for.

If there is one thing that most of us aspire to, it is, simply, to be happy. And yet attaining happiness has become, it appears, anything but simple. Having stuff - the latest, the newest, the best yet - is all too often peddled as the surefire route to happiness. So why then, in our consumer-driven society, is depression, stress and anxiety ever more common, affecting every strata of society and every age, even, worryingly, the very young?

Dan Mathews knew that his witty, bawdy 78-year-old mother, Perry, was unable to maintain her fierce independence - so he flew her across the country to Virginia to live with him in an 1870 townhouse badly in need of repairs. But to Dan, a screwdriver is a cocktail not a tool, and he was soon overwhelmed with two fixer-uppers: the house and his mother.

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.

Could you be happier? When Hugh van Cuylenburg went to India on a teaching trip he met a joyful 10-year-old student who taught him lessons that changed his life. Since setting up The Resilience Project, Hugh has shared what he learned with over a million Australians through his show GEM, a series of comical anecdotes, moving stories and practical methods for leading a happier and more resilient life.

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.

Nina McCall was one of many women unfairly imprisoned by the United States government throughout the 20th century. Tens, probably hundreds, of thousands of women and girls were locked up - usually without due process - simply because officials suspected these women were prostitutes, carrying STIs, or just "promiscuous." This discriminatory program, dubbed the "American Plan", lasted from the 1910s into the 1950s, implicating a number of luminaries, including Eleanor Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Earl Warren, and even Eliot Ness.

In Never Enough, Pete is ready to face his pain, to deal with his past in healthier ways than he has previously. In his candid, raw, honest tone, Pete, released from reality, and very much a work-in-progress, shares the lessons he has learned, the good, the bad, the ugly, calling time on toxic positivity, the damaging impact of social media on our sense of self, the pressures of masculinity and the desire to remain relevant. Through owning his own s**t and refusing to let it own him, Pete hopes he will help empower others to do the same.

At thirty-seven, Dr. Stephanie Cacioppo was content to be single. She was fulfilled by her work on the neuroscience of romantic love—how finding and growing with a partner literally reshapes our brains. That was, until she met the foremost neuroscientist of loneliness. A whirlwind romance led to marriage, to sharing an office at the University of Chicago. After seven years of being inseparable at work and home, she lost her beloved husband following a devastating battle with cancer.

Growing up, Chasten Glezman Buttigieg didn’t always fit in. He felt different from his father and brothers, who loved to hunt and go camping, and out of place in the rural, conservative small town where he lived. Back then, blending in was more important than feeling seen. So, when Chasten realized he was gay, he kept that part of himself hidden away for a long, painful time. With incredible bravery, and the support of his loved ones, Chasten eventually came out—and when he did, he learned that being true to himself was the most rewarding journey of all.

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.

When Catherine Cho and her husband set off from London to introduce their newborn son to family scattered across the United States, she could not have imagined what lay in store. Before the trip’s end, she develops psychosis, a complete break from reality, which causes her to lose all sense of time and place, including what is real and not real. In desperation, her husband admits her to a nearby psychiatric hospital, where she begins the hard work of rebuilding her identity. In this unwaveringly honest, insightful, and often shocking memoir, Catherine reconstructs her sense of self.

An entertaining, humorous, and inspirational memoir by the founder and chief creative officer of the multimillion-dollar lifestyle brand ban.do, who "has become a hero among women (and likely some men too) who struggle with mental health" (Forbes). Hilarious, hyper-relatable, and filled with fascinating insights and hard-won wisdom on everything from why it’s okay to cry at work to the myth of busyness and perfection to the emotional rating system she uses every day, Gotch’s inspirational memoir dares listeners to live each day with hope, optimism, kindness, and humor.

Serial killers: Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer are often the first names that spring to mind. Many people assume serial killers are primarily an American phenomenon that came about in the latter part of the 20th century. But such assumptions are far from the truth. Serial killers have been around for a very long time and can be found in every corner of the globe - and they're not just limited to the male gender either. Some of these predators have been caught and brought to justice whereas others have never been found, let alone identified.

From the moment war broke out across Europe in 1914, the world entered a new, unparalleled era of modern warfare. Soldiers faced relentless machine gun shelling, incredible artillery power, flame throwers, and gas attacks. Within the first four months of the war, the British Army recorded the nervous collapse of ten percent of its officers; the loss of such manpower to mental illness left the army unable to fill its ranks. Soldiers Don't Go Mad tells for the first time the story of the soldiers and doctors who struggled with the effects of industrial warfare on the human psyche.

What does it really mean to be a man? In Man Alive, Thomas Page McBee attempts to answer that question by focusing on two of the men who most impacted his life - one, his otherwise ordinary father who abused him as a child, and the other, a mugger who almost killed him. Standing at the brink of the life-changing decision to transition from female to male, McBee seeks to understand these examples of flawed manhood and tells us how a brush with violence sent him on the quest to untangle a sinister past and freed him to become the man he was meant to be.

Growing up the good girl in an Irish American family full of drinkers and terrible sleepers, Kathleen Frazier was 12 when her seemingly innocent sleepwalking turned dangerous. Over the next few years, she was a popular A+ student by day, the star of her high school musical. At night she both longed for and dreaded sleep. Frazier moved to Manhattan in the 1980s, hoping for a life in the theater but getting a run of sleepwalking performances instead.

Revealing a startlingly accomplished voice, Evanna uses her book to delve into the very heart of a woman's relationship with her own body. Unwilling to let the darkness of her eating disorder eclipse her dreams, but afraid to fully release the certainty and safety of self-destruction, Evanna explores the pivotal moments and choices in her life that led her down the path of creativity and dreaming and away from the empty pursuit of perfection, and reaches towards acceptance of the wild, sensual and unpredictable reality of womanhood.