Mental Illness Memoirs

She’s Not Herself is a journey to make sense of the effects of multigenerational traumas. Shapiro is ultimately able to forgive (without forgetting) those who left her to fend for herself - and to provide listeners with the wisdom of a seasoned psychotherapist who has examined human vulnerability in its many disguises and has moved through it all with dignity and hope. The result is a memoir of love, loss, loyalty, and healing

Journey Untold: Twisted Love is a candid and powerful memoir about recovering from mental health disorders. If you like unflinching personal stories, expert insight, and hope for a better future, you’ll adore Dr. Hall’s inspirational book.

After a near fatal stroke in 1995, Robert McCrum has gained an intimate understanding of his own mortality. Twenty-two years on, his friends have joined him in experiencing Prospero's 'every third thought' of death as a dominating theme of life. McCrum asks: can we make peace with what Freud calls 'the necessity of dying'? Searching for answers leads him to brain surgeons, psychologists, cancer patients and writers for advice and wisdom.

Following Rachel’s fatal overdose years later, her mother, Carolyn DiPasquale, stumbles upon her daughter’s diaries. Shattered, she searches for answers, retracing her steps to figure out how parents and doctors missed three major mental illnesses.

I wanted to write a book to uplift mentally ill people of the harshest variety, schizophrenic or schizoaffective like I have. I wanted to tell the story of my own life, like some people see me. I am not a pitiable sad case. I am a hero who’s gone on adventures. Sometimes I was unstable, but that is not the purpose of my story.

Nearly one in every five Americans deals with mental illness in a given year, and the rates are climbing. Among physicians, the rate is even higher as the time spent in medical training significantly increases the risk of poor mental health. None of us is fully immune from the ravages of mental health problems. This book is about the fallibility of us all, including the doctors who are supposed to care for us. It is about the fine line of illness and normal emotion and about how to change the norms of medical practice in light of human weakness.

The Stranger on the Bridge is a memoir of the journey Jonny made both personally, and publicly to not only find the person who saved his life, but also to explore how he got to the bridge in the first place and how he continues to manage his diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder. Using extracts from diaries Jonny has been writing from the age of thirteen, this book is a deeply personal memoir with a unique insight on mental health.

My memoir begins at birth, where I almost died, and ends with my suicide attempt at the age of 31. I am grateful that I survived. Somewhere in the aftermath, an old self perished, along with all past trauma. I went through a rebirth and was finally ready to share that part of my story which I had kept hidden and secret from the world. My journey covered mental illness, drug and alcohol addiction, prescription medication abuse, suicide, drug overdose, coma recovery, military base life, house repossession, facing homelessness, gang crime, domestic abuse, divorce, and much more.

Pain is part of human existence, but we understand very little of the mechanics of it. We damage ourselves, we feel pain, we seek help from a professional or learn to not do that bad thing again. The story of what goes on in our body is not this simple. Even medical practitioners themselves often fail to grasp the complexities of our minds and bodies and how they interact when dealing with pain stimulus. Throughout history we've tried to prevent it and mediate its affects, resulting in the current situation we find ourselves; highly medicated with a booming opiates industry.

In the first years of the Weimar Republic, the German psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn gathered a remarkable collection of works by schizophrenic patients that would astonish and delight the world. The Prinzhorn collection, as it was called, inspired a new generation of artists, including Paul Klee, Max Ernst and Salvador Dali. What the doctor could not have known, however, was that these works would later be used to prepare the ground for mass-murder.

This is my life story. This is what mental illness looks like. This is how it breathes. A real life account of a man that is going through mental illness from the state of Ohio.

Kevin Sampsell’s A Common Pornography is a memoir, told in vignettes, that captures the history of one dysfunctional American family. An extension of a 2003 "memory experiment" of the same name, A Common Pornography weaves recollections of small-town youth with darker threads from his family’s story, including incest, madness, betrayal, and death. A regular contributor to Dave Egger’s The Believer and McSweeney’s, Sampsell has written "the kind of book where you want to thank the author for helping you feel less alone with being alive" (Jonathan Ames, author of Wake Up, Sir! and The Double Life Is Twice as Good).

As one of our leading campaigners for justice, human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith has spent a lifetime getting to know his clients—from detainees in Guantánamo Bay to prisoners facing execution on Death Row—and finding out, in his own words, 'what makes them tick'. But for much of his life, closer to home, there was a man whose mind remained off limits: his own father. It was only years after Dick's death, when Clive inherited more than 3,000 of his letters, that he could finally take a breath and start to piece together the obsessive personality behind them.

This collection of poetry, memoirs, and stories of short fiction presents to the listener such themes as depression, suicide, hopelessness, grief, loss, love, mental illness, and abuse both emotional and physical experienced by the writers or someone close to them. This collection serves to demonstrate that hiding behind shame or fear rather than sharing emotional pain as the authors in these works do is tantamount to putting on a mask; wearing a person suit.

Forfatter og antropolog Ina Kjøgx Pedersen har været på feltarbejde i sin egen familie. Hendes idé var på nærmeste hold at følge sin mors demenssygdom; den sygdom, som er udråbt til at være en af vor tids største personlige og verdensøkonomiske katastrofer, som i ringe omfang lader sig behandle, og som i sundhedsvæsnet kun kan måles negativt: I form af rask tilbagegang. Men ville det også opleves sådan for hende i virkeligheden?

The last place Lisa Eley expects to be is a despondent patient in a psychiatric hospital on suicide watch fighting for her life. As an African American single parent from northwest Baltimore, Lisa knows knock-down, drawn-out hardships and resilient comebacks very well. She rises above every land mine life sets, detonating each with her quiet will and unyielding determination to defeat every adversity in her path. Faith and fate lead her to a new job with a leading agency, a pivotal success leap she thinks. What happens next will have this mild-mannered, upstanding citizen and worshiping Christian plot murder.

From the New York Times best-selling author of The Monopolists, the incredible story of Olympic sailor Kevin Hall and the psychiatric syndrome that makes him believe he stars in a television show of his life.

Outside, the Sky Is Blue is a beautifully drawn, heartbreaking yet also joyful memoir of growing up, of happiness and love, of living with physical and mental ill health, and of being the only one left of a family that had once had so much colour and life.