Mental Illness

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.

Growing up in the 1960s in the suburbs of Chicago, Meg Kissinger’s family seemed to live a charmed life. With eight kids and two loving parents, the Kissingers radiated a warm, boisterous energy. Whether they were spending summer days on the shores of Lake Michigan, barreling down the ski slopes, or navigating the trials of their Catholic school, the Kissingers always knew how to live large and play hard. But behind closed doors, a harsher reality was unfolding.

Her mood swings drove away her would-be husband. Can she slow life down before she’s left behind? Maggie Hovis battles herself daily. Scrambling to pick up the pieces after something possesses her to pelt a shoe at her fiancé, the law student quickly takes up the suggestion to see a therapist. But she’s crushed when she receives a stigmatizing Bipolar II diagnosis and fears her shot at normal just died. Now saddled with a label and terrified she’ll end up like her institutionalized great aunt, Maggie delves into her family’s storied history of mental illness. And with tensions at a...

The title, “The Endless Tunnel,” teases you to come on in and see if you, like primary author Cindy Koch, can make it through the many challenges along life’s pathin the eerie darkness toward the little light far off in the distance. The sub-title “A Poetic Journey Through the Tortured Mind of a Woman Battling a Lifetime of Mental Illness and, in Later Years, Incurable Cancer,” delves into herstruggles with a bipolar diagnoses and schizophrenia, and also with rectal cancer. Abandoned by her natural mother when she was just an infant and suffering subsequent beatings at the hands ...

An inspiring and unforgettable memoir that provides hope to others who are experiencing depression, mania, or psychosis, RESILIENT is a deeply personal account about life with mental illness, hearing loss and resiliency. Liz's journey provides encouragement for patients, families, friends, and healthcare workers by showing that recovery is possible.

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 ...

The Bahamas is a 700-island nation off the coast of Florida, home to 400,000 inhabitants. I grew up there and lived a charmed life: we had a mansion on an acre of land with 270-degree ocean views, a maid, a gardener and a boat. I went to the best school on the island of Nassau, was skippering sunfish boats from the age of 7 and had a happy circle of friends. But I also had early signs of a mood disorder. When the offshore banking crisis of the late 1980s pushed us out of our idyllic paradise, my family and I relocated to Florida, a move that exacerbated my mood disorder at the start of high...

Wouldn’t you want to travel to a fantasy world, discover the secrets of magic, and live your own legend? Well, Emily went through exactly that, but it didn’t start all that well for her. Emily Erikson, an avid tabletop RPG fan and dungeon master, finds herself in a world full of wonder where the very gods walk the lands, with no idea of how she got here. When her knowledge of popular fantasy tropes proves to be an unreliable basis for making choices, she must quickly learn to adapt to everything that’s thrown her way—or she may need to look for a True Resurrection spell. But this ...

America has made mental illness a crime. Jails in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago each house more people with mental illnesses than any hospital. In this revelatory book, journalist Alisa Roth goes deep inside the criminal justice system to tell how and why it has become a warehouse where inmates are denied proper treatment, abused, and punished in ways that make them sicker. Through intimate stories of people in the system and those trying to fix it, Roth reveals the hidden forces behind this crisis and suggests how a fairer and more humane approach might look.

Our brains do their best to help us out, but every so often they can be real assholes - having meltdowns, getting addicted to things, or shutting down completely at the worst possible moments. Your brain knows it's not good to do these things, but it can't help it sometimes - especially if it's obsessing about trauma it can't overcome. That's where this life-changing book comes in. With humor, patience, science, and lots of good-ole swearing, Dr. Faith explains what's going on in your skull, and talks you through the process of retraining your brain to respond appropriately....

Are you suffering from the condition known as schizophrenia or do you know someone who is? This book is a well written guide on learning how to cope with the condition so that you can get help if you need it. I am not a doctor but I have been studying schizophrenia for 10 years and have found that this information can be helpful for anyone struggling with mental illness, and it can improve their quality of life on their own path to recovery.

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.

Exactly what the title says! A guide to spotting psychopaths. One in five people is a psychopath. How many do you know? Psychopaths lie and manipulate and ruin the lives of those around them. Very few psychopaths are in prison or hospital - most are living in the community, with families and jobs. Dr Vernon Coleman MB ChB DSc FRSA is a registered GP and bestselling author who has written widely on mental illness. He has written over 100 books which have sold over two million copies in the UK and been translated into 25 languages. Published by the European Medical Journal. What the papers ...

I've been kidnapped by aliens dressed as cops. They moved me from their prison to a simulated hospital. I can leave any time, but they won't let me. If I don't escape, they'll keep me here forever. If I use the telephone, the phone company will sell my innermost secrets to the government. If I take the medicine they give me, my brain will be replaced with cotton. So yeah. I'm a few sandwiches short of a picnic. 5150: A Transfer Is Duncan MacLeod's debut novel. Fast-paced, frenetic, and unapologetically blunt, the novel takes the hero through a bout with psychosis that lasts for several ...

If you have a daughter with borderline personality disorder (BPD), you may feel frustration, shame, and your family may be at the breaking point dealing with angry outbursts, threats, and constant emergencies. You may even feel guilty for not enjoying spending time with your child - but how can you when her behavior is abusive toward you and the rest of your family? You need solid skills you can use now to help your daughter and hold your family together.

I am writing these little notes to help me cope and to continue to hope that God will cast the doubts away. If you are in the same phase I am in, may God strengthen us as we navigate through the doubts and wait on Him because we do not wait in vain.

The Bipolar Survival Guide Navigating Life, Love, and Mental Health with Resilience, Optimism, and Truth The Bipolar Survival Guide is a candid, compassionate, and deeply insightful guide for those living with bipolar disorder—and the people who love them. Drawing on real-life experience, psychological research, and practical tools, this book empowers readers to reclaim their narrative, reshape their mindset, and build a thriving, fulfilling life despite the diagnosis. This isn’t just a clinical overview or a one-size-fits-all wellness manual. It’s a real-world, stigma-busting, myth-...

Babies don't automatically know how to sleep through the night; they need to be taught. The Sears family has learned from decades of pediatric practice, bolstered by their own parenting experiences, that different babies have different nighttime temperaments - and, of course, different families have different lifestyles. Instead of espousing the kind of "one method fits all" approach advocated in other baby sleep guides, the Sears family explains how you can create a sleep plan that suits the needs of your entire family.

In The Microbiome Solution, Dr. Robynne Chutkan, a preeminent gastroenterologist, explains how the standard Western diet and our super-sanitized lifestyles are starving our microbiomes, depleting the "good bugs" that are crucial for keeping us healthy, and encouraging overgrowth of exactly the wrong types of bacteria, which can leave us vulnerable to a host of autoimmune and chronic health conditions.

August Griffin has lived with mental illness and Tourette’s Syndrome his entire life. For the last five years, he has bounced in and out of the hospital, adding strain to his already precarious living situation with his ailing mother. Life is an uphill battle... that is, until he meets Marnie Robertson in the hospital’s psychiatric ward. The two are complete opposites. Where August is shy and timid, she is wild and vivacious. Where he is poor, she comes from a wealthy family. Despite their differences, August and Marnie share, not only their personal struggles, but their love for ...