Book picks similar to
Fighting for Freedom in America: Memoir of a "Schizophrenia" and Mainstream Cultural Delusions by Tim Dreby
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The Gift of Therapy: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients
Irvin D. Yalom - 2001
Yalom imparts his unique wisdom in "The Gift of Therapy." This remarkable guidebook for successful therapy is, as Yalom remarks, "an idiosyncratic mElange of ideas and techniques that I have found useful in my work. These ideas are so personal, opinionated, and occasionally original that the reader is unlikely to encounter them elsewhere. I selected the eighty-five categories in this volume randomly guided by my passion for the task rather than any particular order or system."At once startlingly profound and irresistibly practical, Yalom's insights will help enrich the therapeutic process for a new generation of patients and counselors.
The Other Side of Normal: How Biology Is Providing the Clues to Unlock the Secrets of Normal and Abnormal Behavior
Jordan Smoller - 2012
Other bestselling works of neurobiology and the mind have focused on mental illness and abnormal behaviors—like the Oliver Sacks classic, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat—but The Other Side of Normal is an eye-opening, thought-provoking, utterly fascinating and totally accessible exploration of the universals of human experience. It will change forever our understanding of who we are and what makes us that way.
What Your Husband Isn't Telling You: A Guided Tour of a Man's Body, Soul, and Spirit
David Murrow - 2012
What's going on inside his man-brain? What secrets is he keeping? What is he afraid of? Why is he so obsessed with (fill-in-the-blank)? Why do men see things so differently? And what about his spiritual life (or lack of it)?David Murrow leads women on a groundbreaking tour of a man's heart, mind, and soul. More than just a book about what men think, it explores the deep forces that determine what they say, do, and believe--secrets most men do not give voice to. Readers will be surprised, fascinated, and encouraged by what they find.
Gorilla and the Bird: A Memoir of Madness and a Mother's Love
Zack McDermott - 2017
Every passerby was an actor; every car would magically stop for him; everything he saw was a cue from "The Producer" to help inspire the performance of a lifetime. After a manic spree around Manhattan, Zack, who is bipolar, was arrested on a subway platform and admitted to Bellevue Hospital. So begins the story of Zack's freefall into psychosis and his desperate, poignant, often darkly funny struggle to claw his way back to sanity. It's a journey that will take him from New York City back to his Kansas roots and to the one person who might be able to save him, his tough, big-hearted Midwestern mother, nicknamed the Bird, whose fierce and steadfast love is the light in Zack's dark world. Before his odyssey is over, Zack will be tackled by guards in mental wards, run naked through cornfields, receive secret messages from the TV, befriend a former Navy Seal and his talking stuffed monkey, and see the Virgin Mary in the whorls of his own back hair. But with the Bird's help, he just might have a shot at pulling through, starting over, and maybe even meeting a woman who can love him back, bipolar and all. Written with raw emotional power, humor, and tenderness, GORILLA AND THE BIRD is a bravely honest account of a young man's unraveling and the relationship that saves him.
The Gender Experiment
L.J. Sellers - 2016
After discovering they were born at the same clinic two decades earlier, she investigates further and uncovers a startling list. With the realization that more gender-fluid people are targeted for elimination, Taylor kicks her investigation into high gear. But the researchers who conducted the experiment aren’t about to let anything interfere with their plans. Soon Taylor is in deep trouble and needs the help of FBI Special Agent Bailey. As Bailey scrambles to track down leads, events spin out of control and she finds herself blocked at every step by powerful military forces. With the clock ticking on Phase 2 of the experiment, can Bailey and Taylor uncover the truth in time to save the other subjects?
Beautiful Bodies: A Memoir
Kimberly Rae Miller - 2017
And trying. And trying some more. She's been at it since she was four years old, when Sesame Street inspired her to go on her first diet. Postcollege, after a brief stint as a diet-pill model, she became a health-and-fitness writer and editor working on celebrities' bestselling bios—sugarcoating the trials and tribulations celebs endure to stay thin. Needless to say, Kim has spent her life in pursuit of the ideal body.But what is the ideal body? Knowing she's far from alone in this struggle, Kim sets out to find the objective definition of this seemingly unattainable level of perfection. While on a fascinating and hilarious journey through time that takes her from obese Paleolithic cavewomen, to the bland menus that Drs. Graham and Kellogg prescribed to promote good morals in addition to good health, to the binge-drinking-prone regimen that caused William the Conqueror's body to explode at his own funeral, Kim ends up discovering a lot about her relationship with her own body.Warm, funny, and brutally honest, Beautiful Bodies is a blend of memoir and social history that will speak to anyone who's ever been caught in a power struggle with his or her own body—in other words, just about everyone.
Skin Game
Caroline Kettlewell - 1999
Skin Game employs clear language and candid reflection to grant general readers as well as students an uncensored profile of a complex and unsettling disorder. "[This] mesmeric memoir examines the obsession with cutting that is believed to afflict somewhere around two million Americans, nearly all of them female," Francine Prose noted in Elle. "[Kettlewell's] language soars and its intensity deepens whenever she is recalling the lost joys and the thrilling sensation of sharp steel against her tender skin."
Weekends at Bellevue: Nine Years on the Night Shift at the Psych E.R.
Julie Holland - 2009
Recounts stories from her vast case files that are alternately terrifying, tragically comic, and profoundly moving, all while she deals with her best friend and fellow doctor's fight with cancer.
Crazy All the Time: On The Psych Ward of Bellevue Hospital
Frederick L. Covan - 1994
Written in the tradition of A Woman in Residence and First, Do No Harm, this vivid and acclaimed work of true medicine tells the stories of nine doctoral candidates who spend a year of internship on the psychiatric ward at New York City's infamous Bellevue Hospital.
Well, Girl: An Inside-Out Journey to Wellness
Jami Amerine - 2020
. .If you’ve ever thought that losing weight would lead to happiness. . .If you’ve ever avoided a mirror because you didn’t want to see your reflection. . .If you’ve found Jesus or you’re still searching. . .
Well, Girl, You’ve Come to the Right Place.
*** You’ll find a sassy, funny, authentic, and encouraging friend in master word weaver Jami Amerine, as she comes alongside you to share God’s overwhelming grace and patience in an inside-out journey to wellness. She’ll introduce you to a heavenly Father who adores you, right where you are. And she’ll let you have a peek into the insane ride of her life that led her to complete freedom after years of hating herself—while she was completely and utterly adored by Jesus. This transformational read will set you free. Hilarious, raw, and somehow poetic, Well, Girl offers scriptural truths, honest and thought-provoking ideas about wellness, and an in-depth look at a life free from culture’s lies—with increased self-worth, better overall health, and more confidence in your physical appearance.
Bipolar Disorder Demystified: Mastering the Tightrope of Manic Depression
Lana R. Castle - 2003
In Bipolar Disorder Demystified, author Lana Castle, who has lived the better part of her life with this illness, has turned her personal experience into an eloquent and useful guide to all those who travel down the same path. In clear and honest language, Castle helps readers understand the true nature of bipolar disorder, the factors that complicate its diagnosis, and strategies for coping with the illness. Bipolar Disorder Demystified makes great strides in dispelling the mystery surrounding this illness, helping readers decide if it's time to seek treatment, and providing those with any form of mood disorder the information they need to better manage their lives.
Whose Mind Is It Anyway?: Get Out of Your Head and Into Your Life
Lisa Esile - 2016
Your mind doesn't want you to take that new job, sign up for that pottery class, or ask someone out. It wants you to stay unemployed, unfulfilled, and single because it enjoys routine and is resistant to change, no matter how positive the change may be. But more often than not, that's not what you want. Whose Mind Is It Anyway? will help you learn how to separate what you want from what your brain wants and how to do less when your mind is trying to trick you into doing more. In a colorful, funny, and nonthreatening way, it answers the difficult question of how we can take control of our self-defeating behaviors. Filled with charming illustrations, this book will be the friendly voice in your head to counter your negative thoughts, and it will teach you how to finally be at peace with all that you are.
The Cancer Whisperer: How to let cancer heal your life
Sophie Sabbage - 2015
Cancer does not have me.'
Sophie Sabbage was diagnosed with late stage 'incurable' lung cancer in October 2014. She was 48 years old, happily married with a 4-year-old daughter. Since that day - when doctors told Sophie that her prognosis was poor - she has been on a remarkable journey of healing and transformation that has reshaped her vocation as well as changed her life for the better. The Cancer Whisperer chronicles Sophie's extraordinary relationship with cancer and the methods that she has used for dealing with fear, anger, denial and grief. The essence of 'cancer whispering' was born of Sophie's determination to take cancer off the battlefield and into the classroom. Instead of going to war with it, Sophie has chosen to listen to it, learn from it and choose her own response to it.Sophie offers a radically different way of relating to this disease both mentally and practically: she shares the research she has done, the treatments she has chosen, the diet she follows and the resources that she feels have made the biggest differences in the hope that they will help others cut through the mass of information out there.Sophie says: 'This book is for the cancer patient who wants to remain a dignified, empowered human being even when your doctors and diagnosis are scaring the hell out of you. It is also for the cancer patient who has a hunch that there is something for them to learn, gain or even be transformed by - if they just knew how to relate to this disease differently to the way most of society does. It is for the cancer patient, perhaps any patient.'
The Rainman's Third Cure: An Irregular Education
Peter Coyote - 2015
For Coyote, the twin forces Dylan identifies as Texas Medicine and Railroad Gin – represent the competing forces of the transcendental, inclusive, and ecstatic world of love with the competitive, status-seeking world of wealth and power. The Rainman’s Third Cure is the tale of a young man caught between these apparently antipodal options and the journey that leads him from the privileged halls of power to Greenwich Village jazz bars, to jail, to the White House, lessons from a man who literally held the power of life and death over others, to government service and international success on stage and screen.Expanding his frame beyond the wild ride through the 1960’s counterculture that occupied so much of his lauded debut memoir, Sleeping Where I Fall, Coyote provides readers intimate portraits of mentors that shaped him—a violent, intimidating father, a be-bop Bass player who teaches him that life can be improvised, a Mafia consiglieri, who demonstrates to him that men can be bought and manipulated, an ex game-warden who initates him into the laws of nature, a gay dancer in Martha Graham’s company who introduces him to Mexico and marijuanas, beat poet Gary Snyder, who introduces him to Zen practice, and finally famed fashion designer Nino Cerruti who made the high-stakes world of haute monde Europe available to him.What begins as a peripatetic flirtation with Zen deepens into a life-long avocation, ordination as a priest, and finally the road to Transmission---acknowledgement from his teacher that he is ready to be an independent teacher. Through Zen, Coyote discovers a third option that offers an alternative to both the worlds of Love and Power’s correlatives of status seeking and material wealth. Zen was his portal, but what he discovers on the inside is actually available to all humans. In this energetic, reflective and intelligent memoir, The Rainman’s Third Cure is the way out of the box. The way that works.
My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind
Scott Stossel - 2014
Today, it is the most common form of officially classified mental illness. Scott Stossel gracefully guides us across the terrain of an affliction that is pervasive yet too often misunderstood. Drawing on his own long-standing battle with anxiety, Stossel presents an astonishing history, at once intimate and authoritative, of the efforts to understand the condition from medical, cultural, philosophical, and experiential perspectives. He ranges from the earliest medical reports of Galen and Hippocrates, through later observations by Robert Burton and Søren Kierkegaard, to the investigations by great nineteenth-century scientists, such as Charles Darwin, William James, and Sigmund Freud, as they began to explore its sources and causes, to the latest research by neuroscientists and geneticists. Stossel reports on famous individuals who struggled with anxiety, as well as on the afflicted generations of his own family. His portrait of anxiety reveals not only the emotion’s myriad manifestations and the anguish anxiety produces but also the countless psychotherapies, medications, and other (often outlandish) treatments that have been developed to counteract it. Stossel vividly depicts anxiety’s human toll—its crippling impact, its devastating power to paralyze—while at the same time exploring how those who suffer from it find ways to manage and control it. My Age of Anxiety is learned and empathetic, humorous and inspirational, offering the reader great insight into the biological, cultural, and environmental factors that contribute to the affliction.