Three were recent arrivals from battletorn Ireland, horribly traumitized by the nightmare of war. Then there was eleven-year-old Dirkie, who had known no life outside of an institution; Mariana, who was dangerously excitable and sexually precocious, though she was only eight; and Leslie, seven years old, yet completely unresponsive and unable to speak. These were the children entrusted to the care of Torey Hayden, the extraordinary special-education teacher who refused to give up on them. She was determined that every child should experience joy, hope, and a future free of fear, and with compassion, patience, and most of all love, she knew that miracles can happen.

    My kind of crazy is known as bipolar disorder. Although my case is more severe than most, I am not alone. I am one in four (approximately 61.5 million) adult Americans who suffer from a mental illness in a given year. This is a staggering statistic, and yet the stigma attached to mental illness persists. Those diagnosed with a mental illness suffer in silence due to the shame associated with it. There are many books that approach the subject from a clinical and/or psychoanalytical perspective. My book, however, focuses on the human experience of living with a mental illness. Being bipolar brings with it the very highs and lows of emotion, and my story is written in the same way. The journey on which I take the reader is not a depressing one. There is much humor to be found and many lessons to be learned after one is diagnosed as crazy. I bring the reader with me on the emotional rollercoaster that is my life. With my story, I hope to dismantle the shame and isolation that one with a similar illness might experience. In fact, I believe one must embrace his or her inner-craziness in order to heal, evolve, and move forward to help change the societal perception of mental illness. Not unlike diabetes, mental illness should be understood on a biochemical level, not be viewed as a character flaw. When the brain gets sick, it exhibits symptoms that need to be addressed and managed just like any other illness.

    She recounts the travails of growing up in a large, affluent family where there was a paucity of love and of basics such as food and clothing despite the presence of a chauffeur and a cook. She goes on to recount her early hospitalization for depression in poignant detail, as well as her complex relationship with her mercurial, withholding mother.Along the way Merkin also discusses her early, redemptive love of reading and gradual emergence as a writer. She eventually marries, has a child, and suffers severe postpartum depression, for which she is again hospitalized. Merkin also discusses her visits to various therapists and psychopharmocologists, which enables her to probe the causes of depression and its various treatments. The book ends in the present, where the writer has learned how to navigate her depression, if not “cure” it, after a third hospitalization in the wake of her mother’s death.

    The memoir candidly details Rebecca’s two year long chronicle of her struggles with Bipolar Disorder, Depression, Anxiety, Self-Injury, and recovery from a Suicide attempt. Rebecca shares her very real, raw feelings on these subjects, as well as addressing other issues that have contributed to her downward spiral and eventual climb out of her own pit of despair. Issues such as the loss of her mother to lung cancer, the death of her brother, abandonment from friends and family members due to her hospitalization, and more.There is a new version available of this book. It's listed under It's Not Your Journey - Second Edition. It has been updated and redone so that it is more pleasing to the reader. Please feel free to email me at Paradoks1@aol.com if you are having issues finding the book. Thank you!

    In this extraordinary memoir, she opens a window into the experience of wordlessness—the language paralysis called aphasia. In narrating the recovery of her husband, Paul West, from a stroke that reduced his vast vocabulary to a single syllable, she evokes the joy and mystery of the brain’s ability to find and connect words. Deeply rewarding to readers of all kinds, Ackerman has given us a literary love story, accessible insight into the science and medicine of brain injury,and invaluable spiritual sustenance in the face of life’s myriad physical sufferings.

    Daniel Mierlak, a psychiatrist for twenty-five years, on a journey to the stranger corners of human experience. Here you’ll meet: Tony, chauffeur to the fabulously rich, who overcomes crippling anxiety only to find himself descend into a homicidal rage following a botched cosmetic procedure. Amanda, hospitalized for mania, who sees a change to her medicine as an assassination attempt, and then stalks her doctor for a year after discharge. James, a schizophrenic hearing voices telling him to kill himself, whose piano playing leads to a shocking secret about his past. Psychiatric treatment is normally a private encounter and often misunderstood. In describing twelve of his most challenging cases, Dr. Mierlak brings you into his sessions, into his patients’ lives, and into the world of psychiatry. Get ready for some surprises.

    "I don't know if I'm the man you want," he told the charge nurse. "I'm not a fighter." "I don't need fighters," the nurse replied. "I need people who can listen." The Locked Ward is an extraordinary memoir that sets out to reveal the true story of life in a psychiatric ward—the fear, the violence, and despair, and also the care and the compassion. Recounting the stories of the patients he worked with and those of the friends he made on the ward, O'Donnell provides a detailed account of day-to-day life behind the doors of the most feared and stigmatized environment in healthcare. In doing so, he examines the major mental disorders, their symptoms, and manifestations, and how certain triggers such as religion, sex, wealth, health, and drugs bear influence; the methods of treatment, by medication, therapy, and conversation; the love and support of patients' friends and family members; success stories and failures, and attitudes to psychiatric illness, both by the authorities, by those around him—and his own. Over seven years O'Donnell witnessed the day-to-day lives of people suffering from the most hairraising illnesses. What emerges is a document of humanity and humor, a remarkable memoir that sheds light on a world that still remains largely unknown.

    Just twelve, she’s tall, skinny, and weak. It’s four o’clock, and she hasn’t been allowed to eat anything all day. Her mother, on the other hand, seems curiously excited. She's about to suggest open-heart surgery on her child to "get to the bottom of this." She checks her teeth for lipstick and, as the doctor enters, shoots the girl a warning glance. This child will not ruin her plans.SickenedFrom early childhood, Julie Gregory was continually X-rayed, medicated, and operated on—in the vain pursuit of an illness that was created in her mother’s mind. Munchausen by proxy (MBP) is the world’s most hidden and dangerous form of child abuse, in which the caretaker—almost always the mother—invents or induces symptoms in her child because she craves the attention of medical professionals. Many MBP children die, but Julie Gregory not only survived, she escaped the powerful orbit of her mother's madness and rebuilt her identity as a vibrant, healthy young woman.Sickened is a remarkable memoir that speaks in an original and distinctive Midwestern voice, rising to indelible scenes in prose of scathing beauty and fierce humor. Punctuated with Julie's actual medical records, it re-creates the bizarre cocoon of her family's isolated double-wide trailer, their wild shopping sprees and gun-waving confrontations, the astonishing naïveté of medical professionals and social workers. It also exposes the twisted bonds of terror and love that roped Julie's family together—including the love that made a child willing to sacrifice herself to win her mother's happiness. The realization that the sickness lay in her mother, not in herself, would not come to Julie until adulthood. But when it did, it would strike like lightning. Through her painful metamorphosis, she discovered the courage to save her own life—and, ultimately, the life of the girl her mother had found to replace her. Sickened takes us to new places in the human heart and spirit. It is an unforgettable story, unforgettably told.

    But his life started veering off course, and just before returning to his native Scandinavia, he fell into an inexplicable, deep depression. I’ll Run Till the Sun Goes Down is a searingly honest account of David’s struggle to overcome his crippling mental illness. After years of hopeless despair, bleak hospitalizations, and shattered dreams, he is finally saved by his art. The paintbrush becomes his lifeline.Filled with the work of the masters who have inspired him as well as samples of his own drawings and paintings, this memoir offers both a compelling read and a visual story of David’s courageous battle with depression.

    An intelligent account of one man's experiences of mental illness and institutions: a rare insight into a hidden world.

     It is a remarkable portrait, too, of the life of a psychiatric asylum--the sort of community in which, for better and for worse, hundreds of thousands of people lived out their lives.More than four hundred abandoned suitcases filled with patients’ belongings were found when Willard Psychiatric Center closed in 1995 after 125 years of operation. They are skillfully examined here and compared to the written record to create a moving—and devastating—group portrait of twentieth-century American psychiatric care.

    David A Kessler has studied this question with regard to tobacco, food, and drugs. Over the course of these investigations, he identified one underlying mechanism common to a broad range of human suffering. This phenomenon—capture—is the process by which our attention is hijacked and our brains commandeered by forces outside our control.In Capture, Dr. Kessler considers some of the most profound questions we face as human beings: What are the origins of mental afflictions, from everyday unhappiness to addiction and depression—and how are they connected? Where does healing and transcendence fit into this realm of emotional experience?Analyzing an array of insights from psychology, medicine, neuroscience, literature, philosophy, and theology, Dr. Kessler deconstructs centuries of thinking, examining the central role of capture in mental illness and questioning traditional labels that have obscured our understanding of it. With a new basis for understanding the phenomenon of capture, he explores the concept through the emotionally resonant stories of both well-known and un-known people caught in its throes.The closer we can come to fully comprehending the nature of capture, Dr. Kessler argues, the better the chance to alleviate its deleterious effects and successfully change our thoughts and behavior Ultimately, Capture offers insight into how we form thoughts and emotions, manage trauma, and heal. For the first time, we can begin to understand the underpinnings of not only mental illness, but also our everyday worries and anxieties. Capture is an intimate and critical exploration of the most enduring human mystery of all: the mind.

    In this powerful and inspiring story, Steele tells the story of his hard-won recovery from schizophrenia and how activism and advocacy helped him regain his sanity and go on to give hope and support to so many others like him. His recovery began with a small but intensely dramatic moment. One evening in the spring of 1995, shortly after starting on Risperdal, a new antipsychotic medicine, he realized that the voices that had tormented him for three decades had suddenly stopped. Terrified but also empowered by this new freedom, Steele rose to the challenge of creating a new life. Steele went on to become one of the most vocal advocates of the mentally ill, earning the respect not only of patients and families but also of professionals and policymakers all over America through his tireless devotion to a cause that transformed his life and that of countless others. The Day the Voices Stopped will endure as Ken Steele's testament for all who struggle with this heartbreaking disease.

    This literary memoir takes readers from her childhood in India where depression is thought to be a curse to life in America where she eventually finds the light within by drawing on both her rich Hindu heritage and Western medicine to find healing.As a young girl in Bangalore, Gayathri was surrounded by the fragrance of jasmine and flickering oil lamps, her family protected by Hindu gods and goddesses. But as she grew older, demons came forth from the dark corners of her idyllic kingdom--with the scariest creatures lurking within her.The daughter of a respected Brahmin family, Gayathri began to feel different. "I can hardly eat, sleep, or think straight. The only thing I can do is cry unending tears." Her parents insisted it was all in her head. Because traditional Indian culture had no concept of depression as an illness, no doctor could diagnose and no medicine could heal her mysterious malady.This memoir traces Gayathri's courageous battle with the depression that consumed her from adolescence through marriage and a move to the United States. It was only after the birth of her first child, when her husband discovered her in the backyard "clawing the earth furiously with my bare hands, intent on digging a grave so that I could bury myself alive," that she finally found help. After a stay in a psych ward she eventually found "the light within," an emotional and spiritual awakening from the darkness of her tortured mind.Gayathri's inspiring story provides a first-of-its-kind cross-cultural view of mental illness--how it is regarded in India and in America, and how she drew on both her rich Hindu heritage and Western medicine to find healing.

    Reasons to Stay Alive is Matt’s inspiring account of how, minute by minute and day by day, he overcame the disease with the help of reading, writing, and the love of his parents and his girlfriend (and now-wife), Andrea. And eventually, he learned to appreciate life all the more for it. Everyone’s lives are touched by mental illness: if we do not suffer from it ourselves, then we have a friend or loved one who does. Matt’s frankness about his experiences is both inspiring to those who feel daunted by depression and illuminating to those who are mystified by it. Above all, his humor and encouragement never let us lose sight of hope. Speaking as his present self to his former self in the depths of depression, Matt is adamant that the oldest cliché is the truest—there is light at the end of the tunnel. He teaches us to celebrate the small joys and moments of peace that life brings, and reminds us that there are always reasons to stay alive.