Mental Illness Memoirs

Scheier’s mother Judith was a news junkie, a hilarious storyteller, a fast-talking charmer you couldn’t look away from, a single mother whose devotion crossed the line into obsession, and—when in the grips of the mental illness that plagued every day of her life—a violent and abusive liar whose hold on reality was shaky at best. On an uneventful afternoon when Scheier was eighteen, her mother sauntered into the room to tell her two important things.

After the loss of her mother and her own battle with breast cancer, Joanna Teale returns to her graduate research on nesting birds in rural Illinois, determined to prove that her recent hardships have not broken her. She throws herself into her work from dusk to dawn, until her solitary routine is disrupted by the appearance of a mysterious child who shows up at her cabin barefoot and covered in bruises. The girl calls herself Ursa, and she claims to have been sent from the stars to witness five miracles.

Richard Carlson Jr. was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia when he was 21 years of age. His illness first manifested when he was an early adolescent. Modern psychiatry greatly failed Richard for over a decade. Then, after an incident involving the police, he truly understood that his diagnosis was real, and finally began the long process of recovery. Over 10 years later, his life is greatly improved. In the course of his treatment, Richard also recovered from depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and lethargy.

An essential resource designed to help partners of people with bipolar disorder mend strained relationships, negotiate episodic crises, survive the turbulence manic behavior may cause, and more.

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 Art of Letting Go is all about organizing the mess in your mind. It's about how to stop focusing on the past that is over, or the future that may never occur, and being present in the situations that you can actually have agency in.

In Insecure in Love, you'll learn how to overcome attachment anxiety using compassionate self-awareness, a technique that can help you recognize your negative thoughts or unhealthy behavior patterns and respond to them in a nurturing way - rather than beating yourself up. You'll also learn how insecurity can negatively affect healthy dialog between you and your partner (or potential partners) and develop the skills needed to stop you from reverting back to old patterns of neediness and possessiveness.

On a highway in Houston, Texas, Sarah LaBrie’s mother was found screaming at passing cars, terrified she would be murdered by invisible assailants. The diagnosis of schizophrenia that followed compelled Sarah to rethink her childhood, marked at turns by violence and all-consuming closeness. Digging into the events that led to her mother’s break, Sarah traces her family history of mental illness, from the dysphoria that plagued her great-grandmother, a granddaughter of slaves, to her own experience with depression as a scholarship student at Brown.

As a research neuroscientist, Lise Eliot has made the study of the human brain her life's work. But it wasn't until she was pregnant with her first child that she became intrigued with the study of brain development. She wanted to know precisely how the baby's brain is formed, and when and how each sense, skill, and cognitive ability is developed. And most importantly, she was interested in finding out how her role as a nurturer can affect this complex process.

Have you ever felt stuck in a cycle of unresolved pain, playing offenses over and over in your mind? You know you can't go on like this, but you don't know what to do next. Lysa TerKeurst has wrestled through this journey. But in surprising ways, she’s discovered how to let go of bound-up resentment and overcome the resistance to forgiving people who aren’t willing to make things right. With deep empathy, therapeutic insight, and rich Bible teaching coming out of more than 1,000 hours of theological study, Lysa will help you stop suffering because of what other people have done to you.

In this poignant memoir that is both laugh-out-loud funny and sniffle inducing, Clint Edwards explores his lifelong struggle with mental illness in the shadow of his father's battle with the opioid epidemic and his mother's undiagnosed mental illness. From being diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder, to finding love, marriage, and having children, Clint explores what it means to find a healthy and balanced life with mental illness as your copilot.

Following the death of her husband, Hilda Mahaney Tucker begins a lifelong battle with mental illness. Her son. only fifteen-years-old when he first witnesses the onset of his mother's paranoia, tells the story of her rollercoaster life of isolation, electroshock therapy and psychopharmacology, laced with periods of peace and tranquility.

Mark and Giulia's life together began as a storybook romance. They fell in love at 18, married at 24, and were living their dream life in San Francisco. When Giulia was 27, she suffered a terrifying and unexpected psychotic break that landed her in the psych ward for nearly a month. One day she was vibrant and well adjusted; the next she was delusional and suicidal, convinced that her loved ones were not safe.

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.

Mental wellness issues are at an all-time high, and most quick-fixes fail to provide a long-term solution. While billions of dollars are spent annually on feel-better products, most exclusively target the brain and come with a slew of damaging side effects. Mental Fitness outlines the groundbreaking research on the gut-brain-heart axis to improve mood, thinking, and energy through nutrition, mindset, and movements.

At 15, Elizabeth Gilpin was an honor student, a state-ranked swimmer, and a rising soccer star, but behind closed doors, her undiagnosed depression was wreaking havoc on her life. Growing angrier by the day, she began skipping practices and drinking to excess. At a loss, her parents turned to an educational consultant who suggested Elizabeth be enrolled in a behavioral modification program. That recommendation would change her life forever.

The legend behind such songs as "Suzanne," "Bird on the Wire," and "Hallelujah" and the poet and novelist behind such groundbreaking literary works as Beautiful Losers and Book of Mercy, Leonard Cohen is one of the most important and influential artists of our era, a man of powerful emotion and intelligence whose work has explored the definitive issues of human life - sex, religion, power, meaning, love. I'm Your Man is the definitive account of Cohen's extraordinary life.

The Locked Ward is an extraordinary memoir that sets out to reveal the true story of life in a psychiatric ward - the fear, the violence and despair, and also the care and the compassion. Recounting the stories of the patients he worked with, and those of the friends he made on the ward, O'Donnell provides a detailed account of day-to-day life behind the doors of the most feared and stigmatised environment in healthcare.

El autor de este libro pasó de trabajar en el mundo editorial, dar clases de interpretación actoral y estar bien considerado, a ser bipolar, con vida de bipolar, con pensión de bipolar. Y ser mirado y tratado como bipolar; en algunos casos con desconfianza, en otros con paternalismo y casi siempre con recelo.

In a powerful and gripping debut, Rachel Aviv raises fundamental questions about how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. Animated by a profound sense of empathy, Aviv’s exploration is refracted through her own account of living in a hospital ward at the age of six and meeting a fellow patient with whom her life runs parallel—until it no longer does.