Book picks similar to
Cuckoo by Madison Clell


comics
graphic-novels
graphic-medicine
mental-health

Broken Child


Marcia Cameron - 1995
    Written by a woman who endured horrendous abuse from her mother and became a split personality by the age of five, here is the story of her agonizing childhood, the conflicting personalties, and struggle back to sanity.

Solutions and Other Problems


Allie Brosh - 2020
    Allie Brosh returns with a new collection of comedic, autobiographical, and illustrated essays.Solutions and Other Problems includes humorous stories from Allie Brosh’s childhood; the adventures of her very bad animals; merciless dissection of her own character flaws; incisive essays on grief, loneliness, and powerlessness; as well as reflections on the absurdity of modern life.This full-color, beautifully illustrated edition features all-new material with more than 1,600 pieces of art.

Got Parts?: An Insider's Guide to Managing Life Successfully with Dissociative Identity Disorder


A.T.W. - 2004
    It is filled with coping strategies, techniques, and hopes for DID survivors to master real-life issues in relationships, work, parenting, school, time-management, self-care, and medical treatment.Got Parts? is the first book from Loving Healing Press in the New Horizons in Therapy Series edited by psychologist Robert Rich. This exciting new series plans to bring you the best of person-centered therapies in practical application, theory, and self-help formats. Robert Rich, M.Sc., Ph.D., M.A.P.S., A.A.S.H. is a highly experienced counseling psychologist.

When Rabbit Howls


Truddi Chase - 1987
    What surfaced was terrifying: she was inhabited by 'the Troops'-92 individual personalities. This groundbreaking true story is made all the more extraordinary in that it was written by the Troops themselves. What they reveal is a spellbinding descent into a personal hell-and an ultimate deliverance for the woman they became.

Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done?


Harold Schechter - 2021
    DID YOU HEAR WHAT EDDIE GEIN DONE? is an in-depth exploration of the Gein family and what led to the creation of the necrophile who haunted the dreams of 1950s America and inspired such films as Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Silence of the Lambs. Painstakingly researched and illustrated, Schechter and Powell's true-crime graphic novel takes the Gein story out of the realms of exploitation and gives the reader a fact-based dramatization of these tragic, psychotic and heartbreaking events. Because, in this case, the truth needs no embellishment to be horrifying.

Stitches


David Small - 2009
    A vocal cord removed, his throat slashed and stitched together like a bloody boot, the fourteen-year-old boy had not been told that he had cancer and was expected to die.In Stitches, Small, the award-winning children’s illustrator and author, re-creates this terrifying event in a life story that might have been imagined by Kafka. As the images painfully tumble out, one by one, we gain a ringside seat at a gothic family drama where David—a highly anxious yet supremely talented child—all too often became the unwitting object of his parents’ buried frustration and rage.Believing that they were trying to do their best, David’s parents did just the reverse. Edward Small, a Detroit physician, who vented his own anger by hitting a punching bag, was convinced that he could cure his young son’s respiratory problems with heavy doses of radiation, possibly causing David’s cancer. Elizabeth, David’s mother, tyrannically stingy and excessively scolding, ran the Small household under a cone of silence where emotions, especially her own, were hidden.Depicting this coming-of-age story with dazzling, kaleidoscopic images that turn nightmare into fairy tale, Small tells us of his journey from sickly child to cancer patient, to the troubled teen whose risky decision to run away from home at sixteen—with nothing more than the dream of becoming an artist—will resonate as the ultimate survival statemen.

Rx


Rachel Lindsay - 2018
    But work takes a strange turn when she is promoted onto the Pfizer account and suddenly finds herself on the other side of the curtain, developing ads for an anti-depressant drug. Overwhelmed by her professional life and the self-scrutiny it inspires, her mania takes hold. She quits her job to become an artist, only to be hospitalized by her parents against her will. Over the course of her two weeks in the ward, she tries to find a path out of the hospital and this cycle of treatment. One where she can live the life she wants, finding freedom and autonomy, without sacrificing her dreams in order to stay well.

Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama


Alison Bechdel - 2012
    Now, a second thrilling tale of filial sleuthery, this time about her mother: voracious reader, music lover, passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a closeted gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered under the surface of Bechdel's childhood . . . and who stopped touching or kissing her daughter good night, forever, when she was seven. Poignantly, hilariously, Bechdel embarks on a quest for answers concerning the mother-daughter gulf. It's a richly layered search that leads readers from the fascinating life and work of the iconic twentieth-century psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, to one explosively illuminating Dr. Seuss illustration, to Bechdel’s own (serially monogamous) adult love life. And, finally, back to Mother—to a truce, fragile and real-time, that will move and astonish all adult children of gifted mothers.

Depresso, Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace Being Bonkers


Brick. - 2010
    With leaders bent on insane policies and too many citizens locked in crippling depression, normality seems elusive and questionable.Part travelogue, part indictment of mad medicine, 'Depresso' is Tom Freeman's hilarious journey through the vagaries of the system to emerge scathed but content with being 'bonkers'.The story unfolds over several years, in China and the UK, during which anti-depressants reduce Tom to a zombie and alternative therapies drive him to comic re-examinations of his life, his work and relationships.Throughout the adventure he is shadowed by the White Lizard, a familiar, a conscience, a pain in the arse who helps and hinders Tom's recovery, and is justly the butt of some wicked humour.'Depresso' is only semi-fictional.

Calling Dr. Laura


Nicole J. Georges - 2013
    When she was twenty-three, a psychic told her he was alive. Her sister, saddled with guilt, admits that the psychic is right and that the whole family has conspired to keep him a secret. Sent into a tailspin about her identity, Nicole turns to radio talk-show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger for advice.Packed cover-to-cover with heartfelt and disarming black-and-white illustrations, Calling Dr. Laura tells the story of what happens to you when you are raised in a family of secrets, and what happens to your brain (and heart) when you learn the truth from an unlikely source. Part coming-of-age and part coming-out story, Calling Dr. Laura marks the arrival of an exciting and winning new voice in graphic literature.

The Infinite Wait and Other Stories


Julia Wertz - 2012
    1 and 2 (Atomic Books, 2007 and 2009) and Drinking at the Movies (Random House, 2010). In contrast to her last book, which was a full-length graphic memoir, The Infinite Wait is not a sustained narrative, but rather a collection of three short stories or graphic novellas. The stories in this collection contain Wertz’s signature acerbic wit, ribald humour and keen eye for the everyday, but they also find the cartoonist delving into the personal. “Industry” catalogues 25 years of alternately terrible and terrific jobs, from selling golf balls, feeding and failing to feed animals, waitressing, and finally to cartooning and the publication of her first book. “A Strange and Curious Place” is a love letter to Wertz’s hometown library; its mysteries and revelations, and its ability foster growth, rebellion and even artistic affirmation. The most sustained narrative in the collection, the eponymous “The Infinite Wait,” chronicles Wertz’s move from her small hometown to San Francisco, her diagnosis with an incurable, auto-immune disease and her subsequent discovery of comics and comic making.The collection’s title, The Infinite Wait and Other Stories, intentionally and ironically recalls the vacuous and pretentious book titles of the literary elite, but these stories are the polar opposite of pretension. They are comics born out of illness, but not defined by it, and they are filled with the sometimes messy, heartbreaking and hilarious moments that make up a life.

It's All Absolutely Fine


Ruby Elliot - 2016
    Ruby Elliot, aka Rubyetc, is the talent behind the hit tumblr account, 'Rubyetc', which has over 210k followers and growing. Taking readers on a journey through the ups and downs of life, the book will encompass everything from anxiety, bipolar disorder and body image to depression and identity, shining a light on very real problems - all framed with Ruby's trademark humour and originality.Ruby balances mental health with humour, making serious issues accessible - and very funny. With the superb talent to capture the essence of human emotion (and to make you laugh out loud), this book is as important and necessary as it is entertaining. IT'S ALL ABSOLUTELY FINE will include mostly never-before-seen material, both written and illustrated, and will be an empowering book that will make you laugh, make you think, and make things ok.

My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness


Kabi Nagata - 2016
    Told using expressive artwork that invokes both laughter and tears, this moving and highly entertaining single volume depicts not only the artist’s burgeoning sexuality, but many other personal aspects of her life that will resonate with readers.

The Bad Doctor


Ian Williams - 2014
    Incontinent old ladies, men with eagle tattoos, traumatised widowers – Iwan’s patients cause him both empathy and dismay, as he tries to do his best in a world of limited time and budgetary constraints, and in which there are no easy answers. His feelings for his partners also cause him grief: something more than friendship for the sympathetic Dr Lois Pritchard, and not a little frustration at the prankish and obstructive Dr Robert Smith. Iwan’s cycling trips with his friend Arthur provide some welcome relief, but even the landscape is imbued with his patients’ distress. As we explore the phantoms from Iwan’s past, we too begin to feel compassion for The Bad Doctor, and ask what is the dividing line between patient and provider? Wry, comic, graphic, from the humdrum to the tragic, his patients’ stories are the spokes that make Iwan’s wheels go round in this humane and eloquently drawn account of a doctor’s life.

Passing for Human: A Graphic Memoir


Liana Finck - 2018
    In Passing for Human, Finck is on a quest for self-understanding and self-acceptance, and along the way she seeks to answer some eternal questions: What makes us whole? What parts of ourselves do we hide or ignore or chase away—because they’re embarrassing, or inconvenient, or just plain weird—and at what cost?Passing for Human is what Finck calls “a neurological coming-of-age story”—one in which, through her childhood, human connection proved elusive and her most enduring relationships were with plants and rocks and imaginary friends; in which her mother was an artist whose creative life had been stifled by an unhappy first marriage and a deeply sexist society that seemed expressly designed to snuff out creativity in women; in which her father was a doctor who struggled in secret with the guilt of having passed his own form of otherness on to his daughter; and in which, as an adult, Finck finally finds her shadow again—and, with it, her true self.Melancholy and funny, personal and surreal, Passing for Human is a profound exploration of identity by one of the most talented young comic artists working today. Part magical odyssey, part feminist creation myth, this memoir is, most of all, an extraordinary, moving meditation on what it means to be an artist and a woman grappling with the desire to pass for human.