Mental Illness

For more than two hundred years, disturbances of the mind—the sorts of things that were once called "madness"—have been studied and treated by the medical profession. Mental illness, some insist, is a disease like any other, whose origins can be identified and from which one can be cured. But is this true? In this masterful account of America's quest to understand and treat everything from anxiety to psychosis, one of the most provocative thinkers writing about psychiatry today sheds light on its tumultuous past.

If you could enhance the strengths, talents, and health of your future children by modifying your genes, would you do it? This is the opportunity and risk faced by a fabulously wealthy family and their trusted friends. This fast-paced, thoroughly researched (and convincing) thriller addresses topics now appearing in our headlines every day, and carries an important warning about our future as a species.

Tom Scharpling is good at being funny, which is a miracle, considering what he’s survived. Like hitting a deer and narrowly escaping with his life on the night of the 2016 election. But that’s nothing compared to the struggles he had earlier in his life. It Never Ends is his memoir of a life writing comedy amidst a lifelong struggle with mental illness, a story he has never told before. It’s the heartbreaking account of his intense coming-of-age, and the lengths he’s undertaken to pull away from the brink of self-destruction.

Hiding from a controlling and dangerous partner, Grace Rhodes goes off the grid when she joins an artists’ retreat to escape to a remote area of Canada’s Algonquin Provincial Park. There, she bumps into Cam, who brings back old memories—happy memories. If only she had done things differently in the past. In the stunning beauty of the north with her newfound creative friends, Grace finds respite through poetry and reflection but is distracted when she stumbles upon two men searching for a missing friend. The pursuit is on to locate the lost friend in the vast wilderness of the park, ...

Did you know men develop eating disorders too? Trust me, I know a guy! After years of hiding from the shouts of “Fatty” and “Porkchop” in the middle school locker room, Jason was determined to be a weight-loss success story. Only, Jason’s newfound control over food didn’t lead him to the picture-perfect ending he had envisioned. Following a health scare at twenty-nine, Jason turned to “clean eating” as his coping solution to the sudden loss of his parents, living in a run-down apartment, and broken family relationships. Starving for Survival explores how healthy eating can ...

Gracie Hollaman finally decides to follow the voices in her head. She leaves behind her family for the small African-American town of Rockrun to join Mama Toot and Mattie. Together, the three will learn to shed their pasts to begin life anew.

Maria Bamford is a comedian’s comedian (an outsider among outsiders) and has forever fought to find a place to belong. From struggling with an eating disorder as a child of the 1980s, to navigating a career in the arts (and medical debt and psychiatric institutionalization), she has tried just about every method possible to not only be a part of the world, but to want to be a part of it. In Bamford’s “trademark blend of disarming intimacy and dark whimsy” (Publishers Weekly), Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult brings us on a quest to participate in something.

Flora is missing, and I have to find her. She won’t answer my calls, and I’m terrified that she doesn’t love me anymore. Maybe she’s ignoring me because I’m a creep. It’s probably not because she’s been abducted by lizards in suits; they only exist in my paranoid delusions. Probably. I have to warn you, I might not be the most reliable of narrators. If you come with me to look for Flora, you might help keep me sane. Or you might end up in my world instead. I warn you now, this book contains loud noises and flashing images which may upset you. It also leads down unpleasant ...

A man tore her life apart. A woman will help her put it back together… Naomi Wells is no stranger to hardship. Beautiful as she may be, she’s had her fair share of family issues in the past, and that’s not counting the mental illness she had to overcome to get where she is. So yes, if you asked her, she’d say she was finally due a break. Instead, she got a front-row seat to the ultimate betrayal: catching her own husband, Nathan, in their bed with another woman. Devastated, distraught, and defeated, Naomi makes a very controversial choice. She reaches out to Nathan’s ex-wife, Tess...

Getting an accurate diagnosis is the first step toward reclaiming your life from bipolar disorder. But if you or someone you love is struggling with the frantic highs and crushing lows of this illness, there are still many hurdles to surmount at home, at work, and in daily life. You need current information and practical problem-solving advice you can count on. You've come to the right place.

The gargantuan American mental health industry was not healing millions who were desperately in need. He left his position atop the mental health research world to investigate all that was broken - and what a better path to mental health might look like.

In her stirring, vulnerable new memoir, Karena Dawn reveals what it was like to grow up with a mother suffering from severe mental health issues, and how, during her teenage years, she desperately tried to escape her own inner demons. Addicted to pain-numbing drugs and crippled by severe depression, Karena learned how to use grief as a teacher, releasing herself from guilt and shame and finding the inner strength to go from abandonment to forgiveness, from hopelessness to healing.

Imagine finding a glimmer of good news in a diagnosis of Alzheimer's. And imagine how that would change the outlook of the five million Americans who suffer from Alzheimer's disease and other dementias, not to mention their families, loved ones, and caretakers. A neurologist who's been specializing in dementia and memory loss for more than 20 years, Dr. Gayatri Devi rewrites the story of Alzheimer's by defining it as a spectrum disorder - like autism, Alzheimer's is a disease that affects different people differently.

The author has been living with a diagnosis of schizophrenia for 35 years. After becoming ill, he went back to college and got a BS in Computer Science. He then proceeded to work very successfully as a computer programmer for 18 years, until the stress became more than he could handle. He went on disability and has been working as a volunteer recovery educator in psychiatric units at various hospitals for the last 15 years.

WINNER, 12th Annual National Indie Excellence® Awards Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) fried Emmett’s memories and shredded his normalcy. Haunted by lurid hallucinations but determined to put his life back together, he rambles along a dangerous precipice, balancing between the normal life that he craves and the murky sea of mental illness that colors his existence. "This book is amazing! It tells the story of a person with a serious mental illness in the most honest and straight-forward way possible, with no drama, and without glossing over the facts. I recommend this book to anyone who ...

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.

Vince Granata remembers standing in front of his suburban home in Connecticut the day his mother and father returned from the hospital with his three new siblings in tow. He had just finished scrawling their names in orange chalk on the driveway: Christopher, Timothy, and Elizabeth. Twenty-three years later, Vince was a thousand miles away when he received the news that would change his life - his younger brother, Tim, propelled by unchecked schizophrenia, had killed their mother in their childhood home.

Recent advances in affective neuroscience reveal long-held secrets of mental health and illness in the brain. However, the gap between brain science and clinical practice is wide, and many clinicians find neuroscience to be tedious, overly technical and laborious to learn. Clinical psychologist and best-selling author Jennifer Sweeton details the eight main areas of the brain affected by mental illness, how brain changes show up in the therapy room as symptoms and behaviours and the types of therapies and psychotherapeutic techniques research has shown can heal the brain.

The Mad Genius of Classical Music: Mental Health and the Creative Minds of Composers offers a compelling exploration into the lives of some of history’s most celebrated classical composers and the mental health struggles that profoundly shaped their music. This thought-provoking book takes a deep dive into the personal lives and psychological struggles of composers like Beethoven, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Schumann, and many others. It explores how their battles with mental illness—from depression and anxiety to bipolar disorder, psychosis, and substance abuse—were inextricably tied to ...

This book digs through the rotten undergrowth which fertilises the mental health industry. The level of failure and deceit is hard to believe. The diagnoses we use are more akin to astrological than medical constructs. We have no medical tests and despite apparent innovations in drugs and therapy, five decades of research has shown no improvement in outcomes from treatment and instead an increase in the numbers categorised as severely mentally ill. Worse, we have convinced the population that they are experiencing pandemics of mental disorders, leading us to fear our ordinary emotions and ...