Book picks similar to
Hunger Pains: The Modern Woman's Tragic Quest for Thinness by Mary Pipher
psychology
non-fiction
nonfiction
eating-disorders
Next to Nothing: A Firsthand Account of One Teenager's Experience with an Eating Disorder
Carrie Arnold - 2007
These illnesses afflict millions of young people, especially women, all over the world. Carrie Arnold developed anorexia as an adolescent and nearly lost her life to the disease. In Next to Nothing, she tells the story of her descent into anorexia, how and why she fell victim to this mysterious illness, and how she was able to seek help and recover after years of therapy and hard work. Now an adult, Arnold uses her own experiences to offer practical advice and guidance to young adults who have recently been diagnosed with an eating disorder, or who are at risk for developing one. Drawing on the expertise of B. Timothy Walsh, M.D., one of America's leading authorities on eating disorders, she reveals in easy-to-understand terms what is known and not known medically about anorexia and bulimia. The book covers such difficult topics as how to make sense of a diagnosis, the various psychotherapies available to those struggling with an eating disorder, psychiatric hospitalization, and how to talk about these illnesses to family and friends. The result is both a compelling memoir and a practical guide that will help to ease the isolation that an eating disorder can impose, showing young people how to manage and maintain their recovery on a daily basis.Part of the Adolescent Mental Health Initiative series of books written specifically for teens and young adults, Next to Nothing will also be a valuable resource to the friends and family of those with eating disorders. It offers much-needed hope to young people, helping them to overcome these illnesses and lead productive and healthy lives.
Troubled: The Failed Promise of America's Behavioral Treatment Programs
Kenneth R. Rosen - 2021
Desperate parents of these “troubled teens” fear it’s their only option. The private, largely unregulated behavioral boot camps break their children down, a damnation the children suffer forever.New York Times journalist Kenneth R. Rosen knows firsthand the brutal emotional, physical, and sexual abuse carried out at these programs. He lived it. In Troubled, Rosen shares more than his experience of lockdown and its aftermath as he unspools the stories of four graduates on their own scarred, faulted journey through the programs into adulthood. Based on three years of reporting and more than one hundred interviews with other clients, their parents, psychologists, and health-care professionals, Troubled combines harrowing storytelling with investigative journalism to expose the disturbing truth about the massively profitable, sometimes fatal, grossly unchecked redirection industry.Not without hope, Troubled ultimately delivers an emotional, crucial tapestry of coming of age, neglect, exploit, trauma, and fraught redemption.
Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity
Andrew Solomon - 2012
He writes about families coping with deafness, dwarfism, Down's syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, or multiple severe disabilities; with children who are prodigies, who are conceived in rape, who become criminals, who are transgender. While each of these characteristics is potentially isolating, the experience of difference within families is universal, and Solomon documents triumphs of love over prejudice in every chapter.All parenting turns on a crucial question: to what extent should parents accept their children for who they are, and to what extent they should help them become their best selves. Drawing on ten years of research and interviews with more than three hundred families, Solomon mines the eloquence of ordinary people facing extreme challenges.Elegantly reported by a spectacularly original and compassionate thinker, Far from the Tree explores how people who love each other must struggle to accept each other—a theme in every family’s life.
The Happiness Trap: How to Stop Struggling and Start Living: A Guide to ACT
Russ Harris - 2007
This empowering book presents the insights and techniques of ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) a revolutionary new psychotherapy based on cutting-edge research in behavioral psychology. By clarifying your values and developing mindfulness (a technique for living fully in the present moment), ACT helps you escape the happiness trap and find true satisfaction in life. The techniques presented in The Happiness Trap will help readers to: • Reduce stress and worry • Handle painful feelings and thoughts more effectively • Break self-defeating habits • Overcome insecurity and self-doubt • Create a rich, full, and meaningful life
Wired for Love: How Understanding Your Partner's Brain and Attachment Style Can Help You Defuse Conflict and Build a Secure Relationship
Stan Tatkin - 2012
Every person is wired for love differently, with different habits, needs, and reactions to conflict. The good news is that most people's minds work in predictable ways and respond well to security, attachment, and rituals, making it possible to actually neurologically prime the brain for greater love and fewer conflicts.Wired for Love is a complete insider’s guide to understanding your partner’s brain and enjoying a romantic relationship built on love and trust. Synthesizing research findings on how and why love lasts drawn from neuroscience, attachment theory, and emotion regulation, this book presents ten guiding principles that can improve any relationship.Strengthen your relationship by:Creating and maintaining a safe “couple bubble” Using morning and evening rituals to stay connected Learning to fight so that nobody loses Becoming the expert on what makes your partner feel loved By learning to use simple gestures and words, readers can learn to put out emotional fires and help their partners feel more safe and secure. The no-fault view of conflict in this book encourages readers to move past a "warring brain" mentality and toward a more cooperative "loving brain" understanding of the relationship. This book is essential reading for couples and others interested in understanding the complex dynamics at work behind love and trust in intimate relationships.While there’s no doubt that love is an inexact science, if you can discover how you and your partner are wired differently, you can overcome your differences to create a lasting intimate connection.
The Food-Mood Solution: All-Natural Ways to Banish Anxiety, Depression, Anger, Stress, Overeating, and Alcohol and Drug Problems--and Feel Good Again
Jack Challem - 2007
He lays out a clear-cut, four-step plan for feeding the brain the right nutrition, presenting advice on choosing the right foods and supplements as well as improving lifestyle habits to help regulate mood swings.
A Mind That Found Itself
Clifford Whittingham Beers - 1908
A Mind that Found Itself is Beers’ own story, as one of five children who all suffered psychological distress and were all confined to mental institutions at one time or another. Beers, who wrote the book after his own confinement, gained the support of the medical profession and was a leader in the mental hygiene movement. A Mind that Found Itself has been an inspiration to many mental health professionals in their choice of a profession. It also did much to help the rest of the world see mental health issues as a serious disease.Clifford Whittingham Beers (1876-1943) was the founder of the American mental hygiene movement. Beers was born in New Haven, Connecticut to Ida and Robert Beers on March 30, 1876. He was one of five children, all of whom would suffer from psychological distress and would die in mental institutions, including Beers himself (see “Clifford W. Beers, Advocate for the Insane”). He graduated from the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale in 1897. In 1900 he was first confined to a private mental institution for depression and paranoia. He would later be confined to another private hospital as well as a state institution. During these periods he experienced and witnessed serious maltreatment at the hands of the staff. After the publication of A Mind That Found Itself (1908), an autobiographical account of his hospitalization and the abuses he suffered during, he gained the support of the medical profession and others in the work to reform the treatment of the mentally ill. In 1909 Beers founded the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, now named Mental Health America, in order to continue the reform for the treatment of the mentally ill. He also started the Clifford Beers Clinic in New Haven in 1913, the first outpatient mental health clinic in the United States. He was a leader in the field until his retirement in 1939.
When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present
Gail Collins - 2009
It ends in 2008 with Hillary Clinton's historic presidential campaign. This was a time of cataclysmic change, when, after four hundred years, expectations about the lives of American women were smashed in just a generation.A comprehensive mix of oral history and Gail Collins's keen research--covering politics, fashion, popular culture, economics, sex, families, and work--When Everything Changed is the definitive book on five crucial decades of progress. The enormous strides made since 1960 include the advent of the birth control pill, the end of "Help Wanted--Male" and "Help Wanted--Female" ads, and the lifting of quotas for women in admission to medical and law schools. Gail Collins describes what has happened in every realm of women's lives, partly through the testimonies of both those who made history and those who simply made their way.Picking up where her highly lauded book America's Women left off, When Everything Changed is a dynamic story, told with the down-to-earth, amusing, and agenda-free tone for which this beloved New York Times columnist is known. Older readers, men and women alike, will be startled as they are reminded of what their lives once were--Father Knows Best and My Little Margie on TV; daily weigh-ins for stewardesses; few female professors; no women in the Boston marathon, in combat zones, or in the police department. Younger readers will see their history in a rich new way. It has been an era packed with drama and dreams--some dashed and others realized beyond anyone's imagining.
Prozac Nation
Elizabeth Wurtzel - 1994
A collective cry for help from a generation who have come of age entrenched in the culture of divorce, economic instability, and AIDS, here is the intensely personal story of a young girl full of promise, whose mood swings have risen and fallen like the lines of a sad ballad.
Empty
Susan Burton - 2020
She just knew she felt her best when she was empty, "like a straw", as she says "something you could blow through."For almost thirty years, Susan Burton has hidden her obsession with food and the secret life of compulsive eating and starving that dominated her adolescence. This is the relentlessly honest, fiercely intelligent story of living with both anorexia and binge-eating disorder, moving past her shame, and learning to tell her secret.When Burton was thirteen, her stable life in suburban Michigan was turned upside down by her parents' abrupt divorce, and she moved to Colorado with her mother and sister. She seized on this move west as an adventure and an opportunity to reinvent herself from middle-school nerd to popular teenage girl. But she hadn't escaped unscathed, and in the fallout from her parents' breakup, an inherited fixation on thinness went from "peculiarity to pathology." She entered into a painful cycle of anorexia and binge eating that formed a subterranean layer to her sunny life. She went from success to success--she went to Yale, scored a dream job at a magazine right out of college, and married her college boyfriend. But in college the compulsive eating got worse--she'd binge, swear it would be the last time, and then, hours later, do it again--and after she graduated she descended into anorexia, her attempt to "quit food."Binge eating is more prevalent than anorexia or bulimia, but there is less research and little storytelling to help us understand it. In tart, soulful prose Susan Burton strikes a blow for the importance of this kind of story; brings to life an indelible cast of characters; and tells an exhilarating story of longing, compulsion and hard-earned self-revelation.
Mothers, Daughters, and Body Image: Learning to Love Ourselves as We Are
Hillary L. McBride - 2017
We are told, over and over—if we just lost weight, fit into those old jeans, or into a new smaller pair—we will be happier and feel better about ourselves. The truth is, so many women despise their appearance, weight, and shape, that experts who study women’s body image now consider this feeling to be normal.But it does not have to be that way. It is possible for us as women to love ourselves, our bodies, as we are. We need a new story about what it means to be a woman in this world. Based on her original research, Hillary L McBride shares the true stories of young women, and their mothers, and provides unique insights into how our relationships with our bodies are shaped by what we see around us and the specific things we can do to have healthier relationships with our appearance, and all the other parts of ourselves that make us women.In Mothers, Daughters, and Body Image, McBride tells her own story of recovery from an eating disorder, and how her struggles led her to dream of a new vision for womanhood—from one without body shame, negative comparisons, or insecurities, to one of freedom, connection, and acceptance.
A Very Hungry Girl
Jessica Weiner - 2003
She was so desperate to be accepted and valued that she spiraled into an eating disorder, experiencing the attendant lack of self-esteem that rules--and almost ruined--her life.This compelling book relates Jessica's very personal story, and also captures her unique persona as she travels the country as a performer and motivational speaker listening to thousands of other people's stories. Through her work, Jessica has become the voice of her generation and speaks with a relatable and realistic point of view. Jessica's work has received national attention by The Washington Post, CNN, MTV and Teen People Magazine.
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).
Safety in Numbers: From 56 to 221 Pounds, My Battle with Eating Disorders
Brittany Burgunder - 2016
Your parents are planning your funeral, and you are given little chance to live. Fast-forward one year. You are now 221 pounds and obese.Safety in Numbers: From 56 to 221 Pounds, My Battle with Eating Disorders is Brittany Burgunder’s raw and captivating memoir of her 10-year battle with three forms of severe eating disorders—anorexia, binge eating, and bulimia. Taken from her extensive journals, she shares her uncensored and disturbing story of fear, sadness, chaos, disbelief and darkness. In the end, though, her first-person account gives a message of hope and triumph. Safety in Numbers is a brutally honest and unique account highlighting a profound struggle at both ends of the weight spectrum with eating disorders. Brittany’s battle shows that a happy and healthy life is possible no matter how hopeless the situation may seem. It provides a firsthand look into an unthinkable journey that will mesmerize, move, and inspire readers. Ultimately, it is a story of survival and strength—no matter what the struggle.
Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World
Elinor Cleghorn - 2021
Elinor Cleghorn became an unwell woman ten years ago. She was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease after a long period of being told her symptoms were anything from psychosomatic to a possible pregnancy. As Elinor learned to live with her unpredictable disease she turned to history for answers, and found an enraging legacy of suffering, mystification, and misdiagnosis.In Unwell Women, Elinor Cleghorn traces the almost unbelievable history of how medicine has failed women by treating their bodies as alien and other, often to perilous effect. The result is an authoritative and groundbreaking exploration of the relationship between women and medical practice, from the wandering womb of Ancient Greece to the rise of witch trials across Europe, and from the dawn of hysteria as a catchall for difficult-to-diagnose disorders to the first forays into autoimmunity and the shifting understanding of hormones, menstruation, menopause, and conditions like endometriosis.Packed with character studies and case histories of women who have suffered, challenged, and rewritten medical orthodoxy--and the men who controlled their fate--this is a revolutionary examination of the relationship between women, illness, and medicine. With these case histories, Elinor pays homage to the women who suffered so strides could be made, and shows how being unwell has become normalized in society and culture, where women have long been distrusted as reliable narrators of their own bodies and pain. But the time for real change is long overdue: answers reside in the body, in the testimonies of unwell women--and their lives depend on medicine learning to listen.