Twitch And Shout: A Touretter’s Tale


Lowell Handler - 1998
    Although he is a successful and acclaimed photojournalist, Handler has often seen himself as an outsider—a social outcast.  With courage and candor, he recalls the difficulties he suffered growing up, the confusion he experienced when doctors misdiagnosed his bizarre behavior as a psychological aberration, and finally how, restless and despairing, he embarked on a quest for answers.   In Twitch and Shout, Handler sets out, camera in hand, on a journey through less than savory parts of America.  From a transvestite bar in Tampa to a flophouse in New Orleans to a community health center in New York, he meets a variety of people who, like himself, don’t conform to the standards of conventional society. With a keen eye for detail and an acute sense of humor, this memoir perfectly captures the unique and unforgettable life of a Touretter.

Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud: Relapse and the Symptoms of Sobriety


Scott Stevens - 2012
    Why would any sober Alcoholic return to the misery? Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud: Relapse and the Symptoms of Sobriety, shows why it's not just once... without pithy slogans or trademarked solutions... from a journalist who has been there. Here's a book explaining how and why relapse happens, how to hold it at bay and why every non-alcoholic should care, without reading like a clinical journal.This ★★★★★ read is for drinkers, ex-drinkers and anyone who knows an alcoholic celebrates and encourages sobriety while giving an ominous warning of the not-so-secret thief in the healthcare system. What are the Symptoms of Sobriety and how do Alcoholics and non-Alcoholics guard against them?What four overlooked stressors trip up recovery?Can you hit bottom sober? Informative and very personal, the narrative dashes along peaks of anger, joy, desperation, relief and hope interspersed with solid data on the disease and guidance for avoiding relapse traps.   Alcoholics and non-alcoholics sometimes believe sobriety is the silver lining to the cloud of alcoholism... but it's not enough to just stop drinking.(I)"I've been sober 23 years... this is the best recovery book I've read." -- One of more than a dozen five-star reviews on Amazon.

Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love


Sue Johnson - 2008
    In Hold Me Tight, Dr. Sue Johnson presents Emotionally Focused Therapy to the general public for the first time. Johnson teaches that the way to save and enrich a relationship is to reestablish safe emotional connection and preserve the attachment bond. With this in mind, she focuses on key moments in a relationship-from "Recognizing the Demon Dialogue" to "Revisiting a Rocky Moment" -- and uses them as touch points for seven healing conversations.Through case studies from her practice, illuminating advice, and practical exercises, couples will learn how to nurture their relationships and ensure a lifetime of love.

The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness


Lori Schiller - 1994
    Six years later she made her first suicide attempt, then wandered the streets of New York City dressed in ragged clothes, tormenting voices crying out in her mind. Lori Schiller had entered the horrifying world of full-blown schizophrenia. She began an ordeal of hospitalizations, halfway houses, relapses, more suicide attempts, and constant, withering despair. But against all odds, she survived. Now in this personal account, she tells how she did it, taking us not only into her own shattered world, but drawing on the words of the doctors who treated her and family members who suffered with her.In this new edition, Lori Schiller recounts the dramatic years following the original publication -- a period involving addiction, relapse, and ultimately, love and recovery.Moving, harrowing, and ultimately uplifting, THE QUIET ROOM is a classic testimony to the ravages of mental illness and the power of perseverance and courage.

Switching Time: A Doctor's Harrowing Story of Treating a Woman with 17 Personalities


Richard Baer - 2007
    Odder still, she reveals that she’s suffering from a persistent memory problem. Routinely, she “loses” parts of her day, finding herself in places she doesn’t remember going to or being told about conversations she doesn’t remember having. Her problems are so pervasive that she often feels like an impersonator in her own life; she doesn’t recognize the people who call themselves her friends, and she can’t even remember being intimate with her own husband. Baer recognizes that Karen is on the verge of suicide and, while trying various medications to keep her alive, attempts to discover the root cause of her strange complaints. It’s the work of months, and then years, to gain Karen’s trust and learn the true extent of the trauma buried in her past. What she eventually reveals is nearly beyond belief, a narrative of a childhood spent grappling with unimaginable horror. How has Karen survived with even a tenuous grasp on sanity?Then Baer receives an envelope in the mail. It’s marked with Karen’s return address but contains a letter from a little girl who writes that she’s seven years old and lives inside of Karen. Soon Baer receives letters from others claiming to be parts of Karen. Under hypnosis, these alternate Karen personalities reveal themselves in shocking variety and with undeniable traits—both physical and psychological. One “alter” is a young boy filled with frightening aggression; another an adult male who considers himself Karen’s protector; and a third a sassy flirt who seeks dominance over the others. It’s only by compartmentalizing her pain, guilt, and fear in this fashion—by “switching time” with alternate selves as the situation warrants—that Karen has been able to function since childhood.Realizing that his patient represents an extreme case of multiple personality disorder, Baer faces the daunting task of creating a therapy that will make Karen whole again. Somehow, in fact, he must gain the trust of each of Karen’s seventeen “alters” and convince them of the necessity of their own annihilation.As powerful as Sybil or The Three Faces of Eve, Switching Time is the first complete account of such therapy to be told from the perspective of the treating physician, a stunningly devoted healer who worked selflessly for decades so that Karen could one day live as a single human being.From the Hardcover edition.

Get Me Out of Here: My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder


Rachel Reiland - 2002
    A mother, wife, and working professional, Reiland was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder at the age of 29—a diagnosis that finally explained her explosive anger, manipulative behaviors, and self-destructive episodes including bouts of anorexia, substance abuse, and promiscuity. A truly riveting read with a hopeful message.

Remembering Satan


Lawrence Wright - 1994
    At first the accusations were confined to molestations in their childhood, but they grew to include torture and rape as recently as the month before. At a time when reported incidents of "recovered memories" had become widespread, these accusations were not unusual. What captured national attention in this case is that, under questioning, Ingram appeared to remember participating in bizarre satanic rites involving his whole family and other members of the sheriff's department.Remembering Satan is a lucid, measured, yet absolutely riveting inquest into a case that destroyed a family, engulfed a small town, and captivated an America obsessed by rumors of a satanic underground. As it follows the increasingly bizarre accusations and confessions, the claims and counterclaims of police, FBI investigators, and mental health professionals. Remembering Satan gives us what is at once a psychological detective story and a domestic tragedy about what happens when modern science is subsumed by our most archaic fears.

A Beautiful Mind


Sylvia Nasar - 1998
    Or the "Phantom of Fine Hall," a figure many students had seen shuffling around the corridors of the math and physics building wearing purple sneakers and writing numerology treatises on the blackboards. The Phantom was John Nash, one of the most brilliant mathematicians of his generation, who had spiraled into schizophrenia in the 1950s. His most important work had been in game theory, which by the 1980s was underpinning a large part of economics. When the Nobel Prize committee began debating a prize for game theory, Nash's name inevitably came up—only to be dismissed, since the prize clearly could not go to a madman. But in 1994 Nash, in remission from schizophrenia, shared the Nobel Prize in economics for work done some 45 years previously.Economist and journalist Sylvia Nasar has written a biography of Nash that looks at all sides of his life. She gives an intelligent, understandable exposition of his mathematical ideas and a picture of schizophrenia that is evocative but decidedly unromantic. Her story of the machinations behind Nash's Nobel is fascinating and one of very few such accounts available in print (the CIA could learn a thing or two from the Nobel committees).

Sometimes Amazing Things Happen: Heartbreak and Hope on the Bellevue Hospital Psychiatric Prison Ward


Elizabeth Ford - 2017
    Elizabeth Ford went through medical school unsure of where she belonged. It wasn’t until she did her psychiatry rotation that she found her calling—to care for one of the most vulnerable populations of mentally ill people, the inmates of New York's jails, including Rikers Island, who are so sick that they are sent to the Bellevue Hospital Prison Ward for care.These men were broken, unloved, without resources or support, and very ill. They could be violent, unpredictable, but they could also be funny and tender and needy. Mostly, they were human and they awakened in Ford a boundless compassion. Her patients made her a great doctor and a better person and, as she treated these men, she learned about doctoring, about nurturing, about parenting, and about love. While Ford was a psychiatrist at Bellevue she becomes a wife and a mother. In her book she shares her struggles to balance her life and her work, to care for her children and her patients, and to maintain the empathy that is essential to her practice—all in the face of a jaded institution, an exhausting workload, and the deeply emotionally taxing nature of her work. Ford brings humor, grace, and humanity to the lives of the patients in her care and in beautifully rendered prose illuminates the inner workings (and failings) of our mental health system, our justice system, and the prison system.

Inferno: A Memoir of Motherhood and Madness


Catherine Cho - 2020
    Before the trip’s end, she develops psychosis. In desperation, her husband admits her to a nearby psychiatric hospital, where she begins the hard work of rebuilding her identity.In this memoir Catherine reconstructs her sense of self, starting with her childhood as the daughter of Korean immigrants, moving through a traumatic past relationship, and on to the early years of her courtship with and marriage to her husband, James. She interweaves these parts of her past with an immediate recounting of the days she spent in the ward.

The Seven Deadly Sins of Psychology: A Manifesto for Reforming the Culture of Scientific Practice


Chris Chambers - 2017
    The Seven Deadly Sins of Psychology diagnoses the ills besetting the discipline today and proposes sensible, practical solutions to ensure that it remains a legitimate and reliable science in the years ahead.In this unflinchingly candid manifesto, Chris Chambers draws on his own experiences as a working scientist to reveal a dark side to psychology that few of us ever see. Using the seven deadly sins as a metaphor, he shows how practitioners are vulnerable to powerful biases that undercut the scientific method, how they routinely torture data until it produces outcomes that can be published in prestigious journals, and how studies are much less reliable than advertised. He reveals how a culture of secrecy denies the public and other researchers access to the results of psychology experiments, how fraudulent academics can operate with impunity, and how an obsession with bean counting creates perverse incentives for academics. Left unchecked, these problems threaten the very future of psychology as a science--but help is here.Outlining a core set of best practices that can be applied across the sciences, Chambers demonstrates how all these sins can be corrected by embracing open science, an emerging philosophy that seeks to make research and its outcomes as transparent as possible.

A Friend Like Henry: The Touching True Story of an Autistic Boy and His Dog


Nuala Gardner - 2007
    Dale was still a baby when his parents realised that something wasn't right. Worried, his mother Nuala took him to see several doctors, before finally hearing the word 'autism' for the first time in a specialist's office. Scared but determined that Dale should live a fulfilling life, Nuala describes her despairat her son's condition, her struggle to prevent Dale being excluded from a 'normal' education and her sense of hopeless isolation. Dale's autism was severe and violent and family life was a daily battleground. But the Gardner's lives were transformed when they welcomed a gorgeous Golden Retriever into the family. The special bond between Dale and his dog Henry helped them to produce the breakthrough in Dale they had long sought. From taking a bath to saying 'I love you', Henry helped introduce Dale to all the normal activities most parents take for granted, and set him on the road to being the charming and well-adjusted young man he is today. This is a heartrending and fascinating account of how one devoted and talented dog helped a little boy conquer his autism.

Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness


Joshua Wolf Shenk - 2005
     Giving shape to the deep depression that pervaded Lincoln's adult life, Joshua Wolf Shenk's Lincoln's Melancholy reveals how this illness influenced both the president's character and his leadership. Lincoln forged a hard path toward mental health from the time he was a young man. Shenk draws from historical record, interviews with Lincoln scholars, and contemporary research on depression to understand the nature of his unhappiness. In the process, he discovers that the President's coping strategies—among them, a rich sense of humor and a tendency toward quiet reflection—ultimately helped him to lead the nation through its greatest turmoil.

The 36-Hour Day: A Family Guide to Caring for People with Alzheimer Disease, Other Dementias, and Memory Loss in Later Life


Nancy L. Mace - 1981
    In addition to the practical and compassionate guidance that have made The 36-Hour Day invaluable to caregivers, the fourth edition is the only edition currently available that includes new information on medical research and the delivery of care.The new edition includes:-new information on diagnostic evaluation-resources for families and adult children who care for people with dementia-updated legal and financial information-the latest information on nursing homes and other communal living arrangements-new information on research, medications, and the biological causes and effects of dementiaAlso available in a large print editionPraise for The 36-Hour Day:

Mondo Macabro: Weird and Wonderful Cinema Around the World


Pete Tombs - 1998
    Fully illustrated, this book includes an Indian song-and-dance version of Dracula; Turkish version of Star Trek and Superman; China's "hopping vampire" films, and much more.