Book picks similar to
Birth of a New Brain: Healing from Postpartum Bipolar Disorder by Dyane Harwood
mental-illness
memoirs
memoir
non-fiction
Great Expectations: The Essential Guide to Breastfeeding
Marianne Neifert - 2009
Distilled from Dr. Mom’s Guide to Breastfeeding, this is the most up-to-date, comprehensive, and effective book on the subject. Neifert has spent the last 25 years addressing the situations that nursing mothers routinely encounter; her sound, reassuring, and practical advice makes this a must-have for all new moms and mothers-to-be.
Road Map to Holland: How I Found My Way Through My Son's First Two Years with Down Syndrome
Jennifer Graf Groneberg - 2008
You need a new road map, and fast...When Jennifer Groneberg and her husband learned they'd be having twin boys, their main concern was whether they'd need an addition on their house. Then, five days after Avery and Bennett were born, Avery was diagnosed with Down syndrome.Here, Jennifer shares the story of what followed. She dealt with doctors-some who helped, and some who were disrespectful or even dangerous. She saw some relationships in her life grow stronger, while severing ties with people who proved unsupportive. And she continues to struggle to find balance in the hardships and joys of raising a child with special needs. This book is a resource, a companion for parents, and above all, a story of the love between a mother and her son-as she learns that Avery is exactly the child she never knew she wanted.
The Annals of a Country Doctor
Carl Matlock - 2017
You’re unlikely to forget the experiences or regret the sharing.
Babies Are Not Pizzas: They're Born, Not Delivered
Rebecca Dekker - 2019
It doesn’t have to be that way. Rebecca planned to give birth at the hospital affiliated with her university, where she was an award-winning nurse researcher finishing her doctoral degree. But hospital practices and policies that were more than twenty years out of date left her with complications that seemed preventable. Worst for Rebecca, her healthy baby was whisked off to a nursery right away. She spent the first few hours after birth begging to see her own baby! A few years later and pregnant again, Rebecca put her research skills to work and examined the hard evidence on what went wrong with her first childbirth experience. She discovered shocking truths that not only impact millions of families every year, but would change the entire course of her life. Embark on a journey with Rebecca as she exposes the stark realities of institutional care during childbirth and reveals inspirational solutions for parents and professionals alike.
Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy
Irvin D. Yalom - 1989
Yalom uncovers the mysteries, frustrations, pathos, and humor at the heart of the therapeutic encounter. In recounting his patients' dilemmas, Yalom not only gives us a rare and enthralling glimpse into their personal desires and motivations but also tells us his own story as he struggles to reconcile his all-too human responses with his sensibility as a psychiatrist. Not since Freud has an author done so much to clarify what goes on between a psychotherapist and a patient.
Bedlam: A Year in the Life of a Mental Hospital
Dominick Bosco - 1992
Bedlam follows the dramatic stories of the hospital staff and the patients themselves, whose stories break hearts as much as they fascinate.
Beautiful Eyes: A Father Transformed
Paul Austin - 2014
He was a medical student and she was a nurse. Everything changed the moment the doctor rushed their infant daughter from the room just after her birth, knowing instantly that something was wrong. Sarah had almond-shaped eyes, a single crease across her palm instead of three, and low-set ears all of which suggested that the baby had Down syndrome.Beginning on the day Sarah is born and ending when she is a young adult living in a group home, Beautiful Eyes is the story of a father's journey toward acceptance of a child who is different. In a voice that is unflinchingly honest and unerringly compassionate, Austin chronicles his life with his daughter: watching her learn to walk and talk and form her own opinions, making decisions about her future, and navigating cultural assumptions and prejudices all the while confronting, with poignancy and moving candor, his own limitations as her father.It is Sarah herself, who, in her own coming of age and her own reconciling with her difference, teaches her father to understand her. Time and again, she surprises him: performing Lady Gaga s "Poker Face" at a talent show; explaining how the word "retarded" is hurtful; reacting to the events of her life with a mixture of love, pain, and humor; and insisting on her own humanity in a world that questions it. As Sarah begins to blossom into herself, her father learns to look past his daughter's disability and see her as the spirited, warmhearted, and uniquely wise person she is.
Happily Ever After: My Journey with Guillain-Barr Syndrome and How I Got My Life Back
Holly Gerlach - 2012
In less than three days, she was paralyzed and could no longer breathe on her own. She was diagnosed with Guillain-Barre syndrome, a rare autoimmune disorder that occurs when the body's immune system mistakenly attacks part of the nervous system. She was admitted to the hospital, where she spent two and a half months in the intensive care unit on a ventilator. She couldn't move, she couldn't speak, and worst of all, she couldn't hold her newborn daughter. She felt like her life was over as she couldn't be the mother that she had always wanted to be. As the weeks went on, the paralysis began to wear off. And once she was able to breathe on her own again, she started on her road to recovery. With intense physiotherapy, she learned how to use her muscles again and eventually how to walk again. She was determined, and worked hard, and after a long four months in the hospital, she was able to reach her goal of getting back to her husband and daughter. Holly Gerlach shares her inspirational story, where she faced the most terrifying and challenging experiences of her life. The book follows her entire journey, starting with the beginning symptoms, through the many months she spent in the hospital. The story continues on well past her release from the hospital, where she fought to regain her independence and eventually got her life back.
The Man Who Couldn't Stop
David Adam - 2014
In this captivating fusion of science, history and personal memoir, writer David Adam explores the weird thoughts that exist within every mind, and how they drive millions of us towards obsessions and compulsions.David has suffered from OCD for twenty years, and The Man Who Couldn’t Stop is his unflinchingly honest attempt to understand the condition and his experiences. What might lead an Ethiopian schoolgirl to eat a wall of her house, piece by piece; or a pair of brothers to die beneath an avalanche of household junk that they had compulsively hoarded? At what point does a harmless idea, a snowflake in a clear summer sky, become a blinding blizzard of unwanted thoughts? Drawing on the latest research on the brain, as well as historical accounts of patients and their treatments, this is a book that will challenge the way you think about what is normal, and what is mental illness.Told with fierce clarity, humour and urgent lyricism, this extraordinary book is both the haunting story of a personal nightmare, and a fascinating doorway into the darkest corners of our minds.
Carrier: Untangling the Danger in My DNA
Bonnie J. Rough - 2010
Rough receives the test results that confirm she is a carrier of the genetic condition "hypohidrotic ectodermal dysplasia," or H.E.D., it propels her on a journey deep into her family's past in the American West.At first glance, H.E.D. seems only to be a superficial condition: a peculiar facial bone structure, sparse hair, few teeth, and an inability to sweat. But a closer look reveals the source of a lifetime of infections, breathing problems, and drug dependency for Bonnie's grandfather Earl, who suffered from the disorder. After a boyhood as a small-town oddity and an adulthood fraught with disaster, Earl died penniless and alone at the age of 49. Bonnie's mother was left with an inheritance that included not just the gene for H.E.D., but also the emotional pain that came from witnessing her father's misery.As Bonnie and her husband consider becoming parents themselves, their biological legacy haunts every decision. The availability of genetic testing gives them new choices to make, choices more excruciating than any previous generation could have imagined. Ultimately, Carrier is a story of a modern moral crisis, one that reveals the eternal tension between past and future."
Diary of Indignities
Patrick Hughes - 2007
With full-color photo essays, the author guides readers past good taste, sense and even logic into the magical, mayhem-ridden world known as his life.
Loose Balls: Easy Money, Hard Fouls, Cheap Laughs, & True Love in the NBA
Jayson Williams - 2000
From revelations about the meanest, softest, and smelliest players in the league, to Williams’s early days as a “young man with a lot of money and not a lot of sense,” to his strong and powerful views on race, privilege, and giving back, Loose Balls is a basketball book unlike any other.No inspirational pieties or chest-thumping boasting here—instead, Jayson Williams gives us the real insider tales of refs, groupies, coaches, entourages, and all the superstars, bench warmers, journeymen, clowns, and other performers in the rarefied circus that is professional basketball.From the Trade Paperback edition.
Hold Me Close, Let Me Go: A Mother, A Daughter and an Adolescence Survived
Adair Lara - 2001
The author, her youngest son, Patrick, her ex-husband, Jim, and her new husband, Bill, all stepped on a five-year roller-coaster ride in which Morgan incarnated the chaos principle in torn jeans and dyed hair. Drinking, drugging, disappearing, suspicious companions, failing and cheating at school, joy riding in a stolen car–there was no variety of adolescent acting out that she didn’t indulge in. For Adair Lara it became an endless sojourn at the end of her rope, a trial immensely complicated by the reappearance in her life of her aging father, a man who had abandoned his wife and seven children decades earlier. Inevitably, Morgan’s misbehavior revives memories of her own headstrong adolescence, while her father’s presence makes agonizingly real for her the consequences of giving up. Paradoxically, he also becomes the source of her best advice.Hold Me Close, Let Me Go is an emotionally charged, often brutally honest memoir that all parents (and anyone who was ever a teenager) will experience shocks of recognition from while reading. It imparts invaluable lessons about holding loved ones close through the roughest passages and about the power of family to overcome the most grievous obstacles. Adair Lara is a clear-eyed and eloquent witness to the complex costs and rewards of motherhood, and her book will redefine for readers their idea of what being “a good enough mother” really means.
Believing It All: Lessons I Learned from My Children
Marc Parent - 2001
The acclaimed book in which a natural-born storyteller relays the vital lessons and inspiration he has drawn from life's most perfect teachers: children.
50 Years in the OR: True Stories of Life, Loss, and Laughter While Giving Anesthesia
Ronald Whitchurch - 2020