As the millions who read her Girl, Wash Your Face and Girl, Stop Apologizing, attend her RISE conferences and follow her on social media know, she also wants to see you transform. When it comes to the “hard seasons” of life—the death of a loved one, divorce, loss of a job—transformation seems impossible when grief and uncertainty dominate your days. Especially when, as Didn’t See that Coming reveals, no one asks to have their future completely rearranged for them.But, as Rachel writes, it is up to you how you come through your pain—you can come through changed for the better, having learned and grown, or stuck in place where your identity becomes rooted in what hurt you. With humor, honesty and true-life stories, in Didn’t See that Coming Rachel Hollis shares how to embrace the difficult moments in life for the learning experiences they are, and that a life well-lived is one of purpose and focused on the essentials. This is a small book about big feelings, inspirational, aspirational, and an anchor that shows that darkness can co-exist with the beautiful.

    Drawing on personal and professional experience, Stephen Shore, who is currently completing his doctoral degree in special education, combines three voices to create a touching and, at the same time, highly informative book for professionals as well as individuals who have Asperger Syndrome. Get a unique perspective on AS across the years!

    Wendy Suzuki one day woke up and realized she didn’t have a life. As an almost-40-year-old award-winning college professor, world-renowned neuroscientist, she had—what many considered—everything: tenure as a professor at New York University; her own very successful neuroscience research lab; prizes for scientific discoveries on cognition and memory; articles published in prestigious scientific journals. As a woman and a scientist, she was the envy of her peers and lauded by her superiors. On paper, she had a stellar career and an impeccable record. What could she possibly be missing? Everything else. Suzuki was overweight. She was tired. She was lonely, had strained work relationships, and for the first time in her life, completely without direction. So she resolved to change her life. The first step--get moving. Everyone knows that exercise makes you feel better—that when you hit the gym despite the dread, you leave in a better mood. Healthy Brain, Happy Life offers the real science of how exercise effects your mind. Using Wendy’s journey from frumpy, fat and frustrated to fit and fabulous as a guide, Healthy Brain offers not just the HOWS of making exercise an important part of life, but the WHYS of the benefits it brings. But movement is just the first step to being Brain Healthy. Once you get your body and mind hooked on exercise, you bring in practices in mindfullness to calm stress and allow your minds to wander to unlock creativity. As your brain begins to change (something called neuroplasticity), the benefits build--you get fitter, improve your memory, increase your ability to work quickly and move from task to task easily. Along with Dr. Suzuki’s 4 minute Brain Hacks, Healthy Brain, Happy Life offers a simple program for changing your life, straight from a leading scientist’s personal experience.

    She stopped sleeping and eating, and began to hallucinate--Michael Jackson wearing masks, demonically cackling Muppets, and faces in windows. She wrote manifestos and math equations in her diary, and infographics on her wall. Eventually hospitalized and diagnosed as bipolar, her prescribed medication was three pink pills -- lithium. In Grand Delusions, Lowe shares her story of life-long episodic madness and the stability she found with lithium, as well as a journalistic exploration of the history and science of the mysterious element. She interviews scientists, psychiatrists, and patients to examine how effective lithium really is and how its side effects can be dangerous for long-term users. Lowe travels to the Bolivian salt mines that hold over half of the world's lithium reserves, as well as to rural America, where turn of the century lithium spas are still touted as a tonic to cure all ills. At the heart of Grand Delusions is Lowe's personal story, detailing her experiences on and off lithium, and the mental health and personal struggles that have accompanied it. Most recently, the longterm effects of lithium have led to her kidney degradation. Now adjusting to new medication after 20 years of lithium, Lowe's pursuit of a stable life continues. Grand Delusions is eye-opening and powerful, tackling an illness and drug that has touched millions of lives and yet remains shrouded in social stigma. With unflinching honesty, Lowe allows us a clear-eyed view into her life, while also offering a compelling historical overview of one of mankind's oldest medical mysteries."

     From the moment she uttered the brave and honest words, "I am an alcoholic," to interviewer George Stephanopoulos, Elizabeth Vargas began writing her story, as her experiences were still raw. Now, in Between Breaths, Vargas discusses her accounts of growing up with anxiety--which began suddenly at the age of six when her father served in Vietnam--and how she dealt with this anxiety as she came of age, eventually turning to alcohol for a release from her painful reality. The now-A&E Network reporter reveals how she found herself living in denial about the extent of her addiction, and how she kept her dependency a secret for so long. She addresses her time in rehab, her first year of sobriety, and the guilt she felt as a working mother who could never find the right balance between a career and parenting. Honest and hopeful, Between Breaths is an inspiring read. Winner of the Books for a Better Life Award in the First Book category Instant New York Times and USA Today Bestseller

    Kathryn Mannix has studied and practiced palliative care for thirty years. In With the End in Mind , she shares beautifully crafted stories from a lifetime of caring for the dying, and makes a case for the therapeutic power of approaching death not with trepidation, but with openness, clarity, and understanding. Weaving the details of her own experiences as a caregiver through stories of her patients, their families, and their distinctive lives, Dr. Mannix discusses the universal, but deeply personal, process of dying. With meditations on life, death, and the space between them, With the End in Mind describes the possibility of meeting death gently, with forethought and preparation, and shows the unexpected beauty, dignity, and profound humanity of life coming to an end.

    But when her father and favorite aunt pass away, Abby fills the void of her loss with rituals: kissing her father's picture over and over each night, washing her hands, counting her steps, and collecting sharp objects that she thinks could harm innocent pedestrians. Then she begins to pray. At first she repeats the few phrases she remembers from synagogue, but by the time she is in high school, Abby is spending hours locked in her closet, urgently reciting a series of incantations and pleas. If she doesn't, she is sure someone else will die, too. The patterns from which she cannot deviate become her shelter and her obsession. In college Abby is diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, and while she accepts this as an explanation for the counting and kissing and collecting, she resists labeling her fiercest obsession, certain that her prayers and her relationship with G-d are not an illness but the cure. She also discovers a new passion: performing comedy. She is never happier than when she dons a wig and makes people laugh. Offstage, however, she remains unable to confront the fears that drive her. She descends into darker compulsions, starving and cutting herself, measuring every calorie and incision. It is only when her earliest, deepest fear is realized that Abby is forced to examine and redefine the terms of her faith and her future. Amen, Amen, Amen is an elegy honoring a mother, father, and beloved aunt who filled a child with music and their own blend of neuroticism. It is an adventure, full of fast cars, unsolved crimes, and close calls. It is part detective story, part love story, about Abby's hunt for answers and someone to guide her to them. It is a young woman's radiant and heartbreaking account of struggling to recognize the bounds and boundlessness of obsession and devotion.

    By the time Molly was old enough to begin to know him, he was frequently delusional, heavily medicated, living in hospitals or care homes or on the road. This title tells her story.

    Standing in the crease facing one-hundred-mile-an-hour slapshots, the entire game riding on your glove hand, standing on your head when necessary-all job requirements for those wanting to be the best goalies in the world. Now imagine doing that job while suffering high anxiety, depression and obsessive compulsive disorder, and having your career nearly literally cut short by a skate across your neck.The Crazy Game takes you deep into the troubled mind of Clint Malarchuk, the former NHL goaltender for the Quebec Nordiques, Washington Capitals and Buffalo Sabres. Even as a boy, Malarchuk faced such deep anxiety that he missed school and acted out at school and with his friends. His OCD changed the way he trained, and he was almost always the last player off the ice. When his throat was slashed during a collision in the crease, Malarchuk nearly died on the ice. Forever changed, he struggled deeply with depression and a dependence on alcohol, which nearly cost him his life and left a bullet in his head.

    It is not a case history or study. I like to think it is a hymn to reality." —Joanne Greenberg

    The result is a book so relentlessly funny and frank, it's totally refreshing.

    More than that, it revealed self-mutilation as a comprehensible, treatable disorder, no longer to be evaded by the public and neglected by professionals. Using copious examples from his practice, Steven Levenkron traces the factors that predispose a personality to self-mutilation: genetics, family experience, childhood trauma, and parental behavior. Written for sufferers, parents, friends, and therapists, Cutting explains why the disorder manifests in self-harming behaviors and describes how patients can be helped.

    But Cullen was no mercy killer, nor was he a simple monster. He was a favorite son, husband, beloved father, best friend, and celebrated caregiver. Implicated in the deaths of as many as 300 patients, he was also perhaps the most prolific serial killer in American history.Cullen's murderous career in the world's most trusted profession spanned sixteen years and nine hospitals across New Jersey and Pennsylvania. When, in March of 2006, Charles Cullen was marched from his final sentencing in an Allentown, Pennsylvania, courthouse into a waiting police van, it seemed certain that the chilling secrets of his life, career, and capture would disappear with him. Now, in a riveting piece of investigative journalism nearly ten years in the making, journalist Charles Graeber presents the whole story for the first time. Based on hundreds of pages of previously unseen police records, interviews, wire-tap recordings and videotapes, as well as exclusive jailhouse conversations with Cullen himself and the confidential informant who helped bring him down, THE GOOD NURSE weaves an urgent, terrifying tale of murder, friendship, and betrayal.Graeber's portrait of Cullen depicts a surprisingly intelligent and complicated young man whose promising career was overwhelmed by his compulsion to kill, and whose shy demeanor masked a twisted interior life hidden even to his family and friends. Were it not for the hardboiled, unrelenting work of two former Newark homicide detectives racing to put together the pieces of Cullen's professional past, and a fellow nurse willing to put everything at risk, including her job and the safety of her children, there's no telling how many more lives could have been lost.In the tradition of In Cold Blood, THE GOOD NURSE does more than chronicle Cullen's deadly career and the breathless efforts to stop him; it paints an incredibly vivid portrait of madness and offers a penetrating look inside America's medical system. Harrowing and irresistibly paced, this book will make you look at medicine, hospitals, and the people who work in them, in an entirely different way.

    But despite the unprecedented attention, our understanding of addiction is trapped in unfounded 20th century ideas, addiction as a crime or as brain disease, and in equally outdated treatment.Challenging both the idea of the addict's "broken brain" and the notion of a simple "addictive personality," The New York Times Bestseller, Unbroken Brain, offers a radical and groundbreaking new perspective, arguing that addictions are learning disorders and shows how seeing the condition this way can untangle our current debates over treatment, prevention and policy. Like autistic traits, addictive behaviors fall on a spectrum -- and they can be a normal response to an extreme situation. By illustrating what addiction is, and is not, the book illustrates how timing, history, family, peers, culture and chemicals come together to create both illness and recovery- and why there is no "addictive personality" or single treatment that works for all.Combining Maia Szalavitz's personal story with a distillation of more than 25 years of science and research, Unbroken Brain provides a paradigm-shifting approach to thinking about addiction.Her writings on radical addiction therapies have been featured in The Washington Post, Vice Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, in addition to multiple other publications. She has been interviewed about her book on many radio shows including Fresh Air with Terry Gross and The Brian Lehrer show.

    The authors' accompanying history of both societal and psychiatric standards for women reveals the degree to which the prevailing societal conventions could reinforce the perception that these women were mad.