In this heartfelt memoir from one of the youngest recipients of the transorbital lobotamy, Howard Dully shares the story of a painfully dysfunctional childhood, a misspent youth, his struggle to claim the life that was taken from him, and his redemption.At twelve, Howard Dully was guilty of the same crimes as other boys his age: he was moody and messy, rambunctious with his brothers, contrary just to prove a point, and perpetually at odds with his parents. Yet somehow, this normal boy became one of the youngest people on whom Dr. Walter Freeman performed his barbaric transorbital--or ice pick-... View More...
"A magnificent gift to those of us who love someone who has a mental illness...Earley has used his considerable skills to meticulously research why the mental health system is so profoundly broken."--Bebe Moore Campbell, author of 72 Hour Hold Former Washington Post reporter Pete Earley had written extensively about the criminal justice system. But it was only when his own son--in the throes of a manic episode--broke into a neighbor's house that he learned what happens to mentally ill people who break a law. This is the Earley family's compelling story, a troubling look at bureaucratic apathy... View More...
"A magnificent gift to those of us who love someone who has a mental illness...Earley has used his considerable skills to meticulously research why the mental health system is so profoundly broken."--Bebe Moore Campbell, author of 72 Hour Hold Former Washington Post reporter Pete Earley had written extensively about the criminal justice system. But it was only when his own son--in the throes of a manic episode--broke into a neighbor's house that he learned what happens to mentally ill people who break a law. This is the Earley family's compelling story, a troubling look at bureaucratic apathy... View More...
The warm and hilarious bestselling memoir by a man diagnosed with Asperger syndrome who sets out to save his marriage. At some point in nearly every marriage, a wife finds herself asking, What the @# % is wrong with my husband? In David Finch's case, this turns out to be an apt question. Five years after he married Kristen, the love of his life, they learn that he has Asperger syndrome. The diagnosis explains David's ever-growing list of quirks and compulsions, but it doesn't make him any easier to live with. Determined to change, David sets out to understand Asperger syndrome and learn to be... View More...
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER An entertaining, humorous, and inspirational memoir by the founder and chief creative officer of the multimillion-dollar lifestyle brand ban.do, who "has become a hero among women (and likely some men too) who struggle with mental health" (Forbes). After graduating from college, Jen Gotch was living with her parents, heartbroken and lost, when she became convinced that her skin had turned green. Hallucinating that she looked like Shrek was terrifying, but it led to her first diagnosis and the start of a journey towards self-awareness, acceptance, success, and ulti... View More...
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER An entertaining, humorous, and inspirational memoir by the founder and chief creative officer of the multimillion-dollar lifestyle brand ban.do, who "has become a hero among women (and likely some men too) who struggle with mental health" (Forbes). After graduating from college, Jen Gotch was living with her parents, heartbroken and lost, when she became convinced that her skin had turned green. Hallucinating that she looked like Shrek was terrifying, but it led to her first diagnosis and the start of a journey towards self-awareness, acceptance, success, and ulti... View More...
One mother's fight to support her son and change a broken system In his early twenties, Mindy Greiling's son, Jim, was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder after experiencing delusions that demanded he kill his mother. At the time, and for more than a decade after, Greiling was a Minnesota state legislator who struggled, along with her husband, to navigate and improve the state's inadequate mental health system. Fix What You Can is an illuminating and frank account of caring for a person with a mental illness, told by a parent and advocate. Greiling describes challenges shared by many fam... View More...
Brain over Binge provides both a gripping personal account and an informative scientific perspective on bulimia and binge eating disorder. The author, Kathryn Hansen, candidly shares her experience as a bulimic and her alternative approach to recovery. Brain over Binge is different than other eating disorder books which typically present binge eating and purging as symptoms of complex emotional and psychological problems. Kathryn disputes this mainstream idea and explains why traditional eating disorder therapy failed her and fails many. She explains how she came to understand her bulimia in a... View More...
*A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER*For Sarah Hepola, alcohol was "the gasoline of all adventure." She spent her evenings at cocktail parties and dark bars where she proudly stayed till last call. Drinking felt like freedom, part of her birthright as a strong, enlightened twenty-first-century woman. But there was a price. She often blacked out, waking up with a blank space where four hours should be. Mornings became detective work on her own life. What did I say last night? How did I meet that guy? She apologized for things she couldn't remember doing, as though she were cleaning up after an evil twi... View More...
One woman's journey to the bottom of the bottle-and back again. In this moving, emotionally charged, and unflinching look at alcoholism and its effects, lawyer and prominent National Public Radio writer and commentator Heather King describes her twenty-year-long descent into the depths of addiction with wit and candor. King went from a highly functioning alcoholic who managed to maintain her grip on reality to living in the lowest of dive bars, drinking around the clock and barely sustaining an existence. With help from the most unexpected source, King stopped her self-destructive spiral and ... View More...
OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOKS OF THE YEARONE OF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL TOP TEN BOOKS OF THE YEARPEOPLE'S #1 BEST BOOK OF THE YEARNamed a BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, TIME, Slate, Smithsonian, The New York Post, and Amazon The heartrending story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease. Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, D... View More...
A New York Times Book Review Favorite Read of 2016"Despair is always described as dull," writes Daphne Merkin, "when the truth is that despair has a light all its own, a lunar glow, the color of mottled silver." This Close to Happy--Merkin's rare, vividly personal account of what it feels like to suffer from clinical depression--captures this strange light.Daphne Merkin has been hospitalized three times: first, in grade school, for childhood depression; years later, after her daughter was born, for severe postpartum depression; and later still, after her mother died, for obsessive suicidal thi... View More...
Their fabled wealth enabled them to amass great houses and even private islands, but it was a dynasty torn apart by a succession of tragedies: suicide, alcoholism, and extremities of mental illness were passed on from generation to generation. For the women in the family, the consequences of this legacy have been painful. After a difficult childhood, the author s daughter was diagnosed at the age of eighteen with what is now known as borderline personality disorder, a debilitating mental illness that was for the parents in the words of the novelist Sebastian Faulks "a public shame as well as p... View More...
When CBS News Correspondent Barry Petersen married the love of his life twenty-five years ago, he never thought his vow, "until death do us part," would have an expiration date. But Early Onset Alzheimer's claimed Jan Petersen, Barry's beautiful wife, at 55, leaving her unable to remember Barry or their life together.
In the tradition of Kay Redfield Jamison's "An Unquiet Mind," "Acquainted with the Night" is a powerful memoir of one man's struggle to deal with the adolescent depression and bipolar disorder of his son and his daughter. Seven years ago Paul Raeburn's son, Alex, eleven, was admitted to a psychiatric hospital after leaving his fifth-grade classroom in an inexplicable rage. He was hospitalized three times over the next three years until he was finally diagnosed by a psychiatrist as someone exhibiting a clear-cut case of bipolar disorder. This ended a painful period of misdiagnosis and inappropr... View More...
A much-praised memoir of living and surviving mental illness as well as "a stereotype-shattering look at a tenacious woman whose brain is her best friend and her worst enemy" (Time). Elyn R. Saks is an esteemed professor, lawyer, and psychiatrist and is the Orrin B. Evans Professor of Law, Psychology, Psychiatry, and the Behavioral Sciences at the University of Southern California Law School, yet she has suffered from schizophrenia for most of her life, and still has ongoing major episodes of the illness. The Center Cannot Hold is the eloquent, moving story of Elyn's life, from the first tim... View More...
In this compelling memoir, Brooke Shields talks candidly about her experience with postpartum depression after the birth of her daughter, and provides millions of women with an inspiring example of recovery. When Brooke Shields welcomed her newborn daughter, Rowan Francis, into the world, something unexpected followed--a crippling depression. Now, for the first time ever, in Down Came the Rain, Brooke talks about the trials, tribulations, and finally the triumphs that occurred before, during, and after the birth of her daughter. View More...
Winner of the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize finalist, The Noonday Demon examines depression in personal, cultural, and scientific terms. Drawing on his own struggles with the illness and interviews with fellow sufferers, doctors and scientists, policy makers and politicians, drug designers and philosophers, Andrew Solomon reveals the subtle complexities and sheer agony of the disease. He confronts the challenge of defining the illness and describes the vast range of available medications, the efficacy of alternative treatments, and the impact the malady has on various demographic po... View More...
Kiera Van Gelder's first suicide attempt at the age of twelve marked the onset of her struggles with drug addiction, depression, post-traumatic stress, self-harm, and chaotic romantic relationships-all of which eventually led to doctors' belated diagnosis of borderline personality disorder twenty years later. The Buddha and the Borderline is a window into this mysterious and debilitating condition, an unblinking portrayal of one woman's fight against the emotional devastation of borderline personality disorder. This haunting, intimate memoir chronicles both the devastating period that led to K... View More...
