Perfect for fans of When Breath Becomes Air.In 1990, Robert K. Brown was an ordinary college student studying abroad in England when a series of unexpected and extraordinary events would change the trajectory of his life forever. Choosing to ignore ominous early symptoms, he was still troubled enough to write in his journal "just for the record ... I am frightened because things are happening to me that I can’t explain away."What follows is a race against time to return home to Seattle for months of chemotherapy, countless complications, and a search for as much normalcy as possible when you're forced to face your mortality at twenty."While memoirs of surviving disease are plenty, Hundred Percent Chance stands apart through its genuine humor and unflinching portrayal of both the physical and psychological struggles that accompany a diagnosis of disease. Brown avoids inspirational platitudes, instead demonstrating the need for perspective and perseverance in the face of illness."Every person Brown introduces, whether their role is significant or small, will leave a memorable impression on readers. This memoir's focus on the tiny moments that ultimately shape and define a life, are particularly poignant and engrossing" (The BookLife Prize).10% of all proceeds will benefit The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

    The eldest in a family of six and an exceptionally bright and gifted little girl, the discovery shook her family to the core.Trouble in My Head is Mathilde's tender and illuminating account of her struggle to surface from a disease that could have taken her life. With remarkable sensitivity and lucidity she describes her experience of depression, her days in the teenage hospital and her battle to conquer the disease. Mathilde's perspective as a sufferer of teenage depression is unique. Unlike adult depression which involves feelings of guilt, Mathilde describes teenage depression as a breaking down of certainties, the fear of being oneself, the fear of not loving and of not being loved. Adults and teenagers alike will find inspiration and insight in her touching and remarkable account.

    Written with a very funny and riveting honesty as only a person with the illness can do, Bipolar Happens! offers practical knowledge and deep insights into what it is like to live with bipolar disorder.Compelling, insightful and never afraid to tell the truth , many of Julie’s readers credit this book as being their personal catalyst for change. “When I read this book I actually felt that someone really understood me, and it made me feel hope for the first time since my diagnosis. I didn’t know what it meant to be psychotic or why I got overwhelmed a lot in crowds. I learned how to manage mania much better than in the past. And now I can see that I’m not the only one who wakes up with depression. Julie is funny and so willing to say what many people won’t. This book talks about the stuff we go through that never gets put into books. The book is like reading fables. It’s not overwhelming, but you really learn a lot.”

    With the intimacy of private journal-like entries and the language of a poet, she carries us from her childhood to her teen years when hallucinations began to hijack her mind and into adulthood where she began abusing alcohol to temper the punishing voices that only she could hear.This is no formulaic tale of tragedy and triumph: We feel Kristina's hope as she pursues an education and career and begins to build strong family connections, friendships and intimacy-and her devastation as the insistent voices convince her to throw it all away, destroying herself and alienating everyone around her. Woven through the pages of her life are stories of recovery from alcoholism and the search for her sexual identity in relationships with both women and men. Eventually, her journey takes her to a place of relative peace and stability where she finds the inner resources and support system to manage her chronic illnesses and live a fulfilling life.

    The author takes readers there, in a thrilling psychological read. Sequestered where bizarre cult-like techniques become the norm, see for yourself exactly what the controversy is about. Should we mold a child's behavior using the tools of brainwashing? With coarse, brutal dialog and authentic source materials, this nonfiction memoir, the first in a series, exposes the secrets and tells it all. Dead, Insane, or in Jail: A CEDU Memoir is named for the range of options open to the author at 14, if he ran away from the cult his parents inadvertently inducted him into. This is the first time he has told his story. And it’s a doozy. Too many people can relate to this account, unfortunately. Although Rocky Mountain Academy has closed its doors, several hundred residential teen-treatment programs, religious reeducation camps, and places that commit spiritual assassination still operate without oversight in the United States. Imagine (or remember) being a confused teenager. Now imagine that the only solution your parents can devise is sending you away to be “fixed.” Zack’s touching, true account of being trapped in the “scared straight” industry just might be the book your reluctant teenage reader has been seeking. Barbara J. Danis Literacy Specialist / Coach Zack Bonnie’s work is a gift to those interested in the history and dynamics of coercive residential teen-treatment programs. With gut-level insight, humor and frankness, he describes the inner experience of a precocious 14 year-old who was engulfed and overwhelmed by these bizarre, yet legal, forms of psychological abuse. Marcus Chatfield, Author, Institutionalized Persuasion It is sad the abuse of teenagers to tough love programs by mis-informed parents and politicians did not end with the revelations concerning the concept originator Synanon. To be stopped eventually, stories like this must keep being told. Paul Morantz, Esq. Author, Escape: My Life Long War Against Cults It’s often hard to describe how traumatic and damaging “troubled teen” programs for young people are. This important perspective from someone who lived it offers a vivid portrait of hell that is sold as therapy. Maia Szalavitz Author, Help At Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids In the tradition of Darkness At Noon, Zack’s history puts the reader into the life that too many “survivors” experienced, and he does this in a finely crafted page-turner. Philip Elberg, Esq. Zack Bonnie’s memoir is a riveting tale of shame, intimidation, coercion, and frank abuse in the name of “treatment.” The continued existence of programs like CEDU should be considered a national disgrace. Christopher Bellonci, MD Zack Bonnie’s book sheds light on the larger concerns of many families, then and now. Well-meaning parents are vulnerable to programs like Rocky Mountain Academy. Although it was closed years ago, many more such facilities have been established. These schools and programs take good money from families, and harm their children, all the while masquerading as therapy programs. I join Zack in advocating for regulation and reform so that facilities like RMA can no longer manipulate and harm entire families. Robin C Bernhard, LCSW, MEd, BCN Thank you, Zack. Your book succeeds on so many levels – as autobiography, as social criticism, as just a good story – I hope you make a million dollars. John Bodine, Rocky Mountain Academy Alumnus In the years of composing DIJ it became clear that there was lack of detailed information from the inside, and from a young person's point of view, that would ever be considered accurate. I wanted to close the gap and disrupt the secrecy. I wanted to document, in the most realistic way that words would allow, my memories of the time I was at RMA. Zack Bonnie, Author, Dead, Insane, or in Jail: A CEDU Memoir

    He is a fan favorite and his book opens all of the doors and windows into his personal life of tragedy and redemption, the murder of his mother, familial mental illness, and Thom's now openly gay and proud lifestyle. Thom has forgiven his schizophrenic brother, Troy, who will spend the rest of his life in a Wisconsin state prison.

    Though he’d been diagnosed with bipolar disorder as a teenager and had attempted suicide once before, the news came as a shock—and it sent Kelley into a spiral of guilt and grief. After Matt’s death, a chasm opened between the brother Kelley had known and the brother she’d buried. She kept telling herself she couldn’t understand why he’d done it—but the truth was, she could. Several years before he’d been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, she’d been diagnosed with depression. Several years before he first attempted suicide by overdose, she had attempted suicide by overdose. She’d blazed the trail he’d followed. If he couldn’t make it, what hope was there for her?A Different Kind of Same traces Kelley’s journey through grief, her investigation into the role her own depression played in her brother’s death, and, ultimately, her path toward acceptance, forgiveness, resilience, and love.

    This was a girl who succeeded at everything she tried, and who was only getting started.But when Maddy began her long-awaited college career, her parents noticed something changed. Previously indefatigable Maddy became withdrawn, and her thoughts centered on how she could change her life. In spite of thousands of hours of practice and study, she contemplated transferring from the school that had once been her dream. When Maddy's dad, Jim, dropped her off for the first day of spring semester, she held him a second longer than usual. That would be the last time Jim would see his daughter.What Made Maddy Run began as a piece that Kate Fagan, a columnist for espnW, wrote about Maddy's life. What started as a profile of a successful young athlete whose life ended in suicide became so much larger when Fagan started to hear from other college athletes also struggling with mental illness. This is the story of Maddy Holleran's life, and her struggle with depression, which also reveals the mounting pressures young people, and college athletes in particular, face to be perfect, especially in an age of relentless connectivity and social media saturation.

    As a teenager he'd received letters from this stranger father, a self-proclaimed poet and con man doing time in federal prison for bank robbery. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City tells the story of the trajectory that led Nick and his father onto the streets, into that shelter, and finally to each other. .

    Born into an eccentric Ohio clan of modern hunter-gatherers, he grew up hearing voices in his head. Over a dizzying two decades, he was many things—teenage faith healer, world traveler, smuggler, liberation theologian, ladder-maker, squatter, halibut hanger, grifter, environmental warrior, and circus manager—all the while wrestling with schizophrenia and self-medication. From Baby Doc’s Haiti to the Czech Velvet Revolution, and from sex, drugs, and a stabbing to public humiliation by the leader of the free world, Monroe-Kane burns through his twenties and several bridges of youthful idealism before finally saying: enough. In a memoir that blends engaging charm with unflinching frankness, Monroe-Kane gives his testimony of mental illness, drug abuse, faith, and love. By the end of Lithium Jesus there may be a voice in your head, too, saying “Do more, be more, live more. And fear less.”

    word with me," while Ibby wags her finger at the doctor scolding, "Shame on you."They protect each other, Ibby by asserting, "We're not leaving our home," and Ed reassuring, "We're just fine."About his driving Ed defends, "I'm an excellent driver, I've never had an accident." When their daughter, Rosie, finds dings in Ed's car, he dismisses, "Someone must have bumped into me."After Rosie moves them to assisted living, convinced they are on a second honeymoon, they break the news, "We've decided not to have more children."In the late stages, they politely shake Rosie's hand, inquiring, "Now, who are you?"In ALZHEIMER'S DAUGHTER readers journey with Rosie Church from her first suspicions that something is awry to nearly a decade later as she is honored to hold Ed and Ibby's hands when they draw their final breaths.

    It begins with Sally’s visionary crack-up on the streets of Greenwich Village, and continues, among other places, in the out-of-time world of a Manhattan psychiatric ward during the city’s most sweltering months. “I feel like I’m traveling and traveling with nowhere to go back to,” Sally says in a burst of lucidity while hurtling away toward some place her father could not dream of or imagine. Hurry Down Sunshine is the chronicle of that journey, and its effect on Sally and those closest to her–her brother and grandmother, her mother and stepmother, and, not least of all, the author himself. Among Greenberg’s unforgettable gallery of characters are an unconventional psychiatrist, an Orthodox Jewish patient, a manic Classics professor, a movie producer, and a landlord with literary dreams. Unsentimental, nuanced, and deeply humane, Hurry Down Sunshine holds the reader in a mesmerizing state of suspension between the mundane and the transcendent.

    J.J. Keeler proves that. From her fears of the bomb in her teddy bear, to her fear of having run over innocent pedestrians, to her fear that she has killed her waiter, she tells her story in a way that allows us to see inside her disease and to see that she has not lost her sense of humor. This light-hearted yet serious and comforting look at OCD lets some light into the closet of sufferers. This book is for those with OCD, those who love someone with OCD, and for those who would like to know what it's like to live with the daily challenges of OCD.

    With a mix of humor, candor, and compassion, he reveals how, years before his marriage, his self-obsession led to a downward spiral of addiction and depression, culminating in a suicide attempt at the age of twenty. Reflecting on the love and support he experienced in the aftermath, as well as on the lessons he learned from a difficult missionary stint in Russia, his time as a youth leader in the Arizona desert, his marriage, and even a story his father read to him as a child, he shares his deep conviction that the only way you can find your life is to give it away to others.

    Although she is sixteen, she weighs as much as an eight-year-old. We have tried everything the medical system has to offer – psychologists, psychiatrists, family therapists, dieticians, drugs … but nothing has worked. And now here we are, she and I, flying to the other side of the world in a last ditch effort to save her. Anorexia is a difficult thing to get people to understand. Usually they will look at me incredulously. Sometimes they will come right out and say what I know they are thinking: Why can’t you just get her to eat?Anne Tonner is a high achieving human rights lawyer and used to facing battles and winning. But when her 13-year-old daughter Chloe stops eating and is diagnosed with anorexia, she is confronted with the mother of all enemies, one that is completely unfathomable and seemingly incurable. Anne and her family throw everything they have at facing the ‘demon' they name 'Cold Vein'. But some three years later Chloe is still desperately ill and the family is in tatters. In a last ditch effort they travel across the world to attend a ground breaking- clinic in Stockholm, knowing that this might be the only chance Chloe has to survive.Beautifully and engagingly written, Anne’s depiction of the devastating effects of anorexia is honest, tough and compelling. Ultimately uplifting, this story will shed light on one of the most insidious and dangerous mental conditions afflicting modern society today.