Book picks similar to
Eating Disorders and the Brain by Bryan Lask
eating-disorders
psychology
getting-your-head-around-the-brain
health-and-psych
The Disappearing Girl
Heather Topham Wood - 2013
Her beloved father died, leaving her alone with a narcissistic mother who is quick to criticize her daughter’s appearance. During her winter break from college, Kayla’s dangerous obsession with losing weight begins.Kayla feels like her world changes for the better overnight. Being skinny seems to be the key to the happiness she has desperately been seeking. Her mother and friends shower her with compliments, telling her how fantastic she looks. Kayla is starving, but no one knows it.Cameron Bennett explodes into Kayla’s life. He’s sexy and kind—he has every quality she has been looking for in a guy. As Cameron grows closer to Kayla and learns of how far she’s willing to go to stay thin, he becomes desperate to save her.Kayla’s struggles with anorexia and bulimia reach a breaking point and she is forced to confront her body image issues in order to survive. She wonders if Cameron could be the one to help heal her from the pain of her past.New Adult Contemporary-Ages 17+ due to language and sexual situations.
Body Positive Power: How learning to love yourself will save your life
Megan Jayne Crabbe - 2017
We believe that our bodies are the problem, but the truth is that our bodies are not the problem. How we've been taught to see them is the problem... it's time for us all to stop believing the lies, and take our power back.Megan's body image issues began when she was five years old. She spent her childhood chasing thinness, and at fourteen found herself spiralling into anorexia. After recovery she spent years dieting, binging, losing and gaining weight. Then she found body positivity, quit dieting, and finally escaped the cult of thin. Now she's determined to let as many people as possible know the truth: that we are all good enough as we are. If you're tired of being at war with your body, then this book is for you.With her inimitable flair, whip-smart wit and kickass attitude, Megan argues for a new way of seeing ourselves, and a world where every body is celebrated. Where there is no such thing as a ‘bikini body diet’ and 97% of women don’t hate the way they look. A powerful call to arms as much as it is inspirational and practical, this book is the life-changing answer you’ve been looking for.
It's All in Your Head
Suzanne O'Sullivan - 2015
A neurologist's insightful and compassionate look into the misunderstood world of psychosomatic disorders, told through individual case histories
Cognitive Behavior Therapy and Eating Disorders
Christopher G. Fairburn - 2008
Written with the practitioner in mind, the book demonstrates how this transdiagnostic approach can be used with the full range of eating disorders seen in clinical practice. Christopher Fairburn and colleagues describe in detail how to tailor CBT-E to the needs of individual patients, and how to adapt it for patients who require hospitalization. Also addressed are frequently encountered co-occurring disorders and how to manage them. Reproducible appendices feature the Eating Disorder Examination interview and questionnaire. CBT-E is recognized as a best practice for the treatment of adult eating disorders by the U.K. National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE).
More Than a Number
Tia Souders - 2018
Part of the in-crowd at Providence High, she is steps away from being asked out by the most desired guy at school, winning a prom queen nomination, and her parents' approval. If she can just get skinny enough, be pretty enough, and popular enough. All she has to do is eat less than the week before. Lose just one more pound. But soon, she finds herself in a deadly game of self-acceptance. Is love enough to pull her back from the edge?Fans of emotional contemporary YA will fall in love with Souders' heart-wrenching novel. Like Jay Asher's Thirteen Reasons Why and Lauren Oliver's Before I Fall, More Than a Number raises thought-provoking questions about love and acceptance, as well as the cost of beauty. *Previously titled Something of Substance*
Brain Lock: Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior
Jeffrey M. Schwartz - 1996
This Fragile Life: A Mother's Story of a Bipolar Son
Charlotte Pierce-Baker - 2012
At age twenty-five, he was pursuing a postgraduate degree and seemingly in control of his life. She never imagined her high-achieving son would wind up handcuffed, dirty, and in jail. The moving story of an African American family facing the challenge of bipolar disorder, This Fragile Life provides insight into mental disorders as well as family dynamics. Pierce-Baker traces the evolution of her son’s illness and, in looking back, realizes she mistook warning signs for typical child and teen behavior. Hospitalizations, calls in the night, alcohol and drug relapses, pleas for money, and continuous disputes, her son’s journey was long, arduous, and almost fatal. This Fragile Life weaves a fascinating story of mental illness, race, family, the drive of African Americans to succeed, and a mother’s love for her son.
Cold Vein
Anne Tonner - 2017
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.
Codependence and the Power of Detachment: How to Set Boundaries and Make Your Life Your Own
Karen Casey - 2008
And there is a simple way out of it: detachment.In Codependence and the Power of Detachment, bestselling author Karen Casey shares her story and the story of others who have suffered from codependency. Based on the insights and tools she's discovered during her many years of sobriety to address codependency, Casey takes readers through the steps of detaching from a bad situation: admitting the attachment, surrendering the outcome, forgiving, and focusing attention on what works. She describes how to pay attention, be aware, and take care of ourselves, and let others--husbands, family, and coworkers--become accountable for themselves.Codependence and the Power of Detachment shows that detachment is a power anyone can claim. It is the power of sanity, of peace, of finding one's own inner strength.
Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us
Robert D. Hare - 1993
With their flagrant criminal violation of society's rules, serial killers like Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy are among the most dramatic examples of the psychopath. Individuals with this personality disorder are fully aware of the consequences of their actions and know the difference between right and wrong, yet they are terrifyingly self-centered, remorseless, and unable to care about the feelings of others. Perhaps most frightening, they often seem completely normal to unsuspecting targets--and they do not always ply their trade by killing. Presenting a compelling portrait of these dangerous men and women based on 25 years of distinguished scientific research, Dr. Robert D. Hare vividly describes a world of con artists, hustlers, rapists, and other predators who charm, lie, and manipulate their way through life. Are psychopaths mad, or simply bad? How can they be recognized? And how can we protect ourselves? This book provides solid information and surprising insights for anyone seeking to understand this devastating condition.
Starved
Michael Somers - 2012
The night his mother finds him collapsed in the living room is the night he nearly dies from his starvation. He is rushed to the hospital and admitted to an adolescent eating disorders unit. He weighs 112 pounds.Nathan rebels by pretending to go along with the program at first, until his parents refuse to help in his recovery. With only his treatment team and fellow patients to rely on, Nathan comes to terms with the boy who lost himself and the young man who gains himself back, one pound at a time.
Hunger Point
Jillian Medoff - 1997
Bright, wry, blunt, and irreverent, she invites you to witness her family's unraveling. Her Harvard-bound sister is anorexic, her mother is having an affair, her father is obsessed with the Food Network, and her grandfather wants to plan her wedding (even though she has no fiancé, let alone a steady boyfriend).By turns wickedly funny and heartbreakingly bittersweet, Hunger Point chronicles Frannie's triumph over her own self-destructive tendencies, and offers a powerful exploration of the complex relationships that bind together a contemporary American family. You will never forget Frannie, a "sultry, suburban Holden Caulfield," whom critics have called "the most fully realized character to come along in years," (Paper) nor will you forget Hunger Point, an utterly original novel that stuns with its amazing insights and dazzles with its fresh, distinctive voice.
The Anatomy of Evil
Michael H. Stone - 2009
Stone—host of Discovery Channel’s former series Most Evil—uses this common emotional reaction to horrifying acts as his starting point to explore the concept and reality of evil from a new perspective. In an in-depth discussion of the personality traits and behavior that constitute evil across a wide spectrum, Dr. Stone takes a clarifying scientific approach to a topic that for centuries has been inadequately explained by religious doctrines.Basing his analysis on the detailed biographies of more than 600 violent criminals, Stone has created a 22-level hierarchy of evil behavior, which loosely reflects the structure of Dante’s Inferno. He traces two salient personality traits that run the gamut from those who commit crimes of passion to perpetrators of the worst crimes—sadistic torture and murder. One trait is narcissism, as exhibited in people who are so self-centered that they have little or no ability to care about their victims. The other is aggression, the use of power over another person to inflict humiliation, suffering, and death.Stone then turns to the various factors that, singly or intertwined, contribute to pushing certain people over the edge into committing heinous crimes. They include heredity, adverse environments, violence-prone cultures, mental illness or brain injury, and abuse of mind-altering drugs. All are considered in the search for the root causes of evil behavior.What do psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience tell us about the minds of those whose actions could be described as evil? And what will that mean for the rest of us? Stone discusses how an increased understanding of the causes of evil will affect the justice system. He predicts a day when certain persons can safely be declared salvageable and restored to society and when early signs of violence in children may be corrected before potentially dangerous patterns become entrenched.
Cracked: Why Psychiatry is Doing More Harm Than Good
James Davies - 2013
That’s what psychiatry tells us. But many – even most – will not actually be mentally ill. Thanks to pseudo-science and corporate greed, psychiatry is letting us down. Why is psychiatry such big business? Why are so many psychiatric drugs prescribed – 47 million antidepressant prescriptions in the UK alone each year – and why, without solid scientific justification, has the number of mental disorders risen from 106 in 1952 to 374 today? The everyday sufferings and setbacks of life are now ‘medicalised’ into illnesses that require treatment – usually with highly profitable drugs. Psychological therapist James Davies uses his insider knowledge to illustrate for a general readership how psychiatry has put riches and medical status above patients’ well-being.The charge sheet is damning: negative drug trials routinely buried; antidepressants that work no better than placebos; research regularly manipulated to produce positive results; doctors, seduced by huge pharmaceutical rewards, creating more disorders and prescribing more pills; and ethical, scientific and treatment flaws unscrupulously concealed by mass-marketing. Cracked reveals for the first time the true human cost of an industry that, in the name of helping others, has actually been helping itself.