Book picks similar to
When Your Adult Child Breaks Your Heart: Coping with Mental Illness, Substance Abuse, and the Problems That Tear Families Apart by Joel L. Young
mental-health
first-reads
psychology
parenting
Invisible: How Young Women with Serious Health Issues Navigate Work, Relationships, and the Pressure to Seem Just Fine
Michele Lent Hirsch - 2018
She did.Sophie navigates being the only black scientist in her lab while studying the very disease, HIV, that she hides from her coworkers.For Victoria, coming out as a transgender woman was less difficult than coming out as bipolar.Author Michele Lent Hirsch knew she couldn't be the only woman who's faced serious health issues at a young age, as well as the resulting effects on her career, her relationships, and her sense of self. What she found while researching Invisible was a surprisingly large and overlooked population with important stories to tell.Though young women with serious illness tend to be seen as outliers, young female patients are in fact the primary demographic for many illnesses. They are also one of the most ignored groups in our medical system--a system where young women, especially women of color and trans women, are invisible.And because of expectations about gender and age, young women with health issues must often deal with bias in their careers and personal lives. Not only do they feel pressured to seem perfect and youthful, they also find themselves amid labyrinthine obstacles in a culture that has one narrow idea of womanhood.Lent Hirsch weaves her own harrowing experiences together with stories from other women, perspectives from sociologists on structural inequality, and insights from neuroscientists on misogyny in health research. She shows how health issues and disabilities amplify what women in general already confront: warped beauty standards, workplace sexism, worries about romantic partners, and mistrust of their own bodies. By shining a light on this hidden demographic, Lent Hirsch explores the challenges that all women face.
The 10 Best Anxiety Busters: Simple Strategies to Take Control of Your Worry
Margaret Wehrenberg - 2015
So what are the perennially anxious to do?In ten simple techniques, this pocket-sized, anxiety-busting guide boils down the most effective remedies for worry and anxiety, whether chronic or in the moment. From breathing exercises and relaxation practices to thought-stopping techniques, worry “containment,” effective self-talk, and strategies that put an end to catastrophizing once and for all, it’s your go-to guide when anxiety levels begin to boil. Throw it in your carry-on, stow it in your briefcase, or keep it in your desk when you need a quick reminder of some easy techniques that can turn your anxiety from overpowering to manageable in no time.
What You Must Think of Me: A Firsthand Account of One Teenager's Experience with Social Anxiety Disorder
Emily Ford - 2007
Such was the case for Emily Ford, who shares her firsthand experiences in these pages. Emily's true story of fear, struggle, and ultimate triumph is sure to resonate with other socially anxious teenagers and young adults. Emily's frank, often witty, sometimes poignant account of how she negotiated all the obstacles of social anxiety--and eventually overcame them with the help of therapy and hard work--makes for compelling reading. Yet this book is more than just a memoir. Emily's story is coupled with the latest medical and scientific information about the causes, diagnosis, treatment, and self-management of social anxiety disorder (or SAD). Readers will find a wealth of solid advice and genuine inspiration here. In engaging, accessible language--and with the help of psychiatrist Michael Liebowitz--she discusses what is known and not known about social anxiety disorder in adolescents. She outlines the various psychotherapies available for those with SAD and explains how to seek professional help, how to talk to family and friends about the illness, and how to handle difficult social situations. The result is both an absorbing story and a useful guide that will help to ease the isolation caused by SAD, encouraging young people to believe that, with commitment and hard work, they can overcome this illness.Part of the Adolescent Mental Health Initiative series of books written specifically for teens and young adults, What You Must Think of Me will also be a valuable resource for friends and family of those with SAD. It offers much-needed hope to young people, helping them to overcome this illness and lead healthy, productive lives.
The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity
Nadine Burke Harris - 2018
Nadine Burke Harris was already known as a crusading physician delivering targeted care to vulnerable children. But it was Diego — a boy who had stopped growing after a sexual assault — who galvanized her journey to uncover the connections between toxic stress and lifelong illnesses.The news of Burke Harris’s research is just how deeply our bodies can be imprinted by ACEs—adverse childhood experiences like abuse, neglect, parental addiction, mental illness, and divorce. Childhood adversity changes our biological systems, and lasts a lifetime. For anyone who has faced a difficult childhood, or who cares about the millions of children who do, the scientific insight and innovative, acclaimed health interventions in The Deepest Well represent hope for preventing lifelong illness for those we love and for generations to come.
When Someone You Love is Depressed: How to Help Your Loved One Without Losing Yourself
Laura Epstein Rosen - 1996
In this authoritative and compassionate book, psychologists Laura Epstein Rosen and Cavier Francisco Amador explain the mechanisms of depression that can cause communication breakdown, increase hostility, and ultimately destroy relationships. Through compelling real-life stories and step-by-step advice, the authors teach concrete methods that you and your loved one can use to protect yourselves and your relationship from depression's impact. Drawing on their own innovative research, the give sensitive guidance about how to recognize your needs, how to provide the best kind of support, and how to encourage the depressed person to seek treatment. Whether you are the partner, parent, friend, or child of a depressed person, you'll find this book and invaluable companion in you journey back to health.
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.
It's Not Always Depression: Working the Change Triangle to Listen to the Body, Discover Core Emotions, and Connect to Your Authentic Self
Hilary Jacobs Hendel - 2018
Sara suffered a debilitating fear of asserting herself. Spencer experienced crippling social anxiety. Bonnie was shut down, disconnected from her feelings. These patients all came to psychotherapist Hilary Jacobs Hendel seeking treatment for depression, but in fact none of them were chemically depressed. Rather, Jacobs Hendel found that they’d all experienced traumas in their youth that caused them to put up emotional defenses that masqueraded as symptoms of depression. Jacobs Hendel led these patients and others toward lives newly capable of joy and fulfillment through an empathic and effective therapeutic approach that draws on the latest science about the healing power of our emotions. Whereas conventional therapy encourages patients to talk through past events that may trigger anxiety and depression, accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy (AEDP), the method practiced by Jacobs Hendel and pioneered by Diana Fosha, PhD, teaches us to identify the defenses and inhibitory emotions (shame, guilt, and anxiety) that block core emotions (anger, sadness, fear, disgust, joy, excitement, and sexual excitement). Fully experiencing core emotions allows us to enter an openhearted state where we are calm, curious, connected, compassionate, confident, courageous, and clear. In It’s Not Always Depression, Jacobs Hendel shares a unique and pragmatic tool called the Change Triangle—a guide to carry you from a place of disconnection back to your true self. In these pages, she teaches lay readers and helping professionals alike • why all emotions—even the most painful—have value. • how to identify emotions and the defenses we put up against them. • how to get to the root of anxiety—the most common mental illness of our time. • how to have compassion for the child you were and the adult you are. Jacobs Hendel provides navigational tools, body and thought exercises, candid personal anecdotes, and profound insights gleaned from her patients’ remarkable breakthroughs. She shows us how to work the Change Triangle in our everyday lives and chart a deeply personal, powerful, and hopeful course to psychological well-being and emotional engagement.
Obsessed: A Memoir of My Life with OCD
Allison Britz - 2017
She was a dedicated student with tons of extracurricular activities, friends, and loving parents at home.But after awakening from a vivid nightmare in which she was diagnosed with brain cancer, she was convinced the dream had been a warning. Allison believed that she must do something to stop the cancer in her dream from becoming a reality.It started with avoiding sidewalk cracks and quickly grew to counting steps as loudly as possible. Over the following weeks, her brain listed more dangers and fixes. She had to avoid hair dryers, calculators, cell phones, computers, anything green, bananas, oatmeal, and most of her own clothing.Unable to act “normal,” the once-popular Allison became an outcast. Her parents questioned her behavior, leading to explosive fights. When notebook paper, pencils, and most schoolbooks were declared dangerous to her health, her GPA imploded, along with her plans for the future.Finally, she allowed herself to ask for help and was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder. This brave memoir tracks Allison’s descent and ultimately hopeful climb out of the depths.
The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism & Asperger's
Temple Grandin - 2008
Temple Grandin's voice of experience is back to give parents and teachers specific, practical advice on helping young people on the autism spectrum. This collection of articles, written from 2000-present as an exclusive column in the national award-winning magazine, Autism Aspergers Digest, offers Temples invaluable personal and professional insights, from inside the world of autism, about autism. Temple voices her views on a wide variety of topics ranging from the nonverbal child to social functioning, early intervention to adult issues. The articles have been updated and Temple has added fresh commentary on the topics.
A Lethal Inheritance: A Mother Uncovers the Science behind Three Generations of Mental Illness
Victoria Costello - 2012
In Victoria Costello's family mental illness had been given many names over at least four generations until this inherited conspiracy of silence finally endangered the youngest members of the family, her children.In this riveting story--part memoir, detective story, and scientific investigation--in the tradition of the story of Henrietta Lacks, Costello recounts how the mental unraveling of her seventeen-year-old son Alex compelled her to look back into family history for clues to his condition. Eventually she tied Alex's descent into hallucinations and months of shoeless wandering on the streets of Los Angeles to his great grandfather's suicide on a New York City railroad track in 1913.But this insight brought no quick relief. Within two years of Alex's diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, both she and her youngest son succumbed to two different mental disorders: major depression and anxiety disorder. Costello depicts her struggle to get the best possible mental health care for her sons and herself, treatment that ultimately brings each of them to full recovery. In the process, she discovers startling new neuroscience and genetic findings that explain how clusters of mental illness traverse family generations.The author closes by translating what she's learned into a set of ground rules for "New, New Parenting," advice to help individuals and families recover from addictions and mental disorders, and prevent their return in future generations.
Beyond Blue: Surviving Depression & Anxiety and Making the Most of Bad Genes
Therese J. Borchard - 2009
That, combined with her keen writing abilities has made her Beliefnet blog, Beyond Blue, one of the most trafficked blogs on the site.BEYOND BLUE, the book, is part memoir/part self-help. It describes Borchard's experience of living with manic depression as well as providing cutting-edge research and information on dealing with mood disorders. By exposing her vulnerability, she endears herself immediately to the reader and then reduces even the most depressed to laughter as she provides a companion on the journey to recovery and the knowledge that the reader is not alone.Comprised of four sections and twenty-one chapters, BEYOND BLUE covers a wide range of topics from codependency to addiction, poor body image to postpartum depression, from alternative medicine to psychopharmacology, managing anxiety to applying lessons from therapy. Because of her laser wit and Erma Bombeck sense of humor, every chapter is entertaining as well as serious.
Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Cancer Book: 101 Stories of Courage, Support Love
Jack Canfield - 2009
Writers share all their experiences — from the initial diagnosis, to breaking the news to loved ones, to discussing the effect on home, school, and work. Stories also cover securing a medical team, living through an ever-changing self-image, the embarrassment of losing hair, and discovering a new spirituality. Plus a Bonus Book—the inspirational frank memoir It’s Just a Word by cancer patient Elizabeth Bayer
The Little Book of Heartbreak: Love Gone Wrong Through the Ages
Meghan Laslocky - 2012
Award-winning journalist Meghan Laslocky advises: read through the pain. From divorce cases in ancient Rome to the art of crafting the perfect “I'm over you” mix CD, The Little Book of Heartbreak is a whirlwind tour through love's most crushing moments, including:• How Ernest Hemingway cheated on his wife and then stole her job• Painter Oscar Kokoschka's attempt to win back an ex by creating (and having liaisons with!) her life-size replica• Morrissey's personal creed about how sex is useless• What to watch, listen to, and read to forget an ex faster than you can say “rebound”
Imagine Me Gone
Adam Haslett - 2016
She decides to marry him. Imagine Me Gone is the unforgettable story of what unfolds from this act of love and faith. At the heart of it is their eldest son, Michael, a brilliant, anxious music fanatic who makes sense of the world through parody. Over the span of decades, his younger siblings -- the savvy and responsible Celia and the ambitious and tightly controlled Alec -- struggle along with their mother to care for Michael's increasingly troubled and precarious existence. Told in alternating points of view by all five members of the family, this searing, gut-wrenching, and yet frequently hilarious novel brings alive with remarkable depth and poignancy the love of a mother for her children, the often inescapable devotion siblings feel toward one another, and the legacy of a father's pain in the life of a family. With his striking emotional precision and lively, inventive language, Adam Haslett has given us something rare: a novel with the power to change how we see the most important people in our lives.
The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head: A Psychiatrist’s Stories of His Most Bizarre Cases
Gary Small - 2010
Pink, author of Drive and A Whole New MindA psychiatrist’s stories of his most bizarre cases, The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head by Gary Small, M.D., and Gigi Vorgan—co-authors of The Memory Bible—offers a fascinating and highly entertaining look into the peculiarities of the human mind. In the vein of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Awakenings, and the other bestselling works of Oliver Sacks, The Naked Lady Who Stood on Her Head surprises, enthralls, and illuminates as it focuses on medical mysteries that would stump and amaze the brilliant brains on House, M.D.