Download or read book W 3 written by Bette Howland and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2021-06-24 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ‘Dazzlingly and daringly written’ Rachel Cooke, Observer W-3 is a small psychiatric ward in a large university hospital, a world of pills and passes dispensed by an all-powerful staff, a world of veteran patients with grab-bags of tricks, a world of dishevelled, moment-to-moment existence on the edge of permanence. Bette Howland was one of those patients. In 1968, Howland was thirty-one, a single mother of two young sons, struggling to support her family on the part-time salary of a librarian; and labouring day and night at her typewriter to be a writer. One afternoon, while staying at her friend Saul Bellow’s apartment, she swallowed a bottle of pills. W-3 is a vivid – and often surprisingly funny – portrait of the extraordinary community of Ward 3 and a record of a defining moment in a writer’s life. The book itself would be her salvation: she wrote herself out of the grave. Originally published in 1974 and rediscovered forty years later, this is the first edition of W-3 to be published in the UK. With an original introduction by Yiyun Li, author of Where Reasons End. ‘W-3 is one hell of a debut’ Lucy Scholes, Paris Review ‘Howland is finally getting the recognition that she deserves’ Sarah Hughes, iNews

Download or read book The Collected Schizophrenias written by Esmé Weijun Wang and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2019-06-27 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Dazzling ... in her kaleidoscopic essays, memoir has been shattered into sliding and overlapping pieces ... mind-expanding' The New York Times Book Review Esmé Weijun Wang was officially diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder in 2013, although the hallucinations and psychotic episodes had started years before that. In the midst of a high functioning life at Yale, Stanford and the literary world, she would find herself floored by an overwhelming terror that 'spread like blood', or convinced that she was dead, or that her friends were robots, or spiders were eating holes in her brain. What happens when your whole conception of yourself is turned upside down? When you're aware of what is occurring to you, but unable to do anything about it? Written with immediacy and unflinching honesty, this visceral and moving book is Wang's story, as she steps both inside and outside of her condition to bring it to light. Following her own diagnosis and the many manifestations of schizophrenia in her life, she ranges over everything from how we label mental illness to her own use of fashion and make-up to present herself as high-functioning, from the failures of the higher education system to how factors such as PTSD and Lyme disease compounded her experiences. Wang's analytical, intelligent eye, honed as a former lab researcher at Stanford, allows her to balance research with haunting personal narrative. The Collected Schizophrenias cuts right to the core and provides unique insight into a condition long misdiagnosed and much misunderstood.

Download or read book Committed written by Dinah Miller and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-01 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: They assess what psychiatry knows about the prediction of violence and the limitations of laws designed to protect the public.

Download or read book Mental Disorder and Crime written by Sheilagh Hodgins and published by SAGE Publications, Incorporated. This book was released on 1992-12-29 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributors to this volume present and discuss new data which suggest that major mental disorder substantially increases the risk of violent crime. These findings come at a crucial time, since those who suffer from mental disorders are increasingly living in the community, rather than in institutions. The book describes the magnitude and complexity of the problem and offers hope that humane, effective intervention can prevent violent crime being committed by the seriously mentally disordered.

Download or read book The Finest Traditions of My Calling written by Abraham M. Nussbaum and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Patients and doctors alike are keenly aware that the medical world is in the midst of great change. We live in an era of continuous healthcare reforms, many of which focus on high volume, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. This compelling, thoughtful book is the response of a practicing physician who explains how population-based reforms are diminishing the relationship between doctor and patients, to the detriment of both. As an antidote to stubbornly held traditions, Dr. Abraham M. Nussbaum suggests ways that doctors and patients can learn what it means to be ill and to seek medical assistance. Drawing on personal stories, validated studies, and neglected history, the author develops a series of metaphors to explore a doctor's role in different healthcare reform scenarios: scientist, technician, author, gardener, teacher, servant, and witness. Each role shapes what physicians see when they encounter a patient. Dr. Nussbaum cautions that true healthcare reform can happen only when those who practice medicine can see, and be seen by, their patients as fellow creatures. His memoir makes a hopeful appeal for change, and his insights reveal the direction that change must take."--Jacket flap.

Download or read book Nonsuicidal Self Injury written by E. David Klonsky and published by Hogrefe Publishing GmbH. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 99 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) is a baffling, troubling, and hard to treat phenomenon that has increased markedly in recent years. Key issues in diagnosing and treating NSSI adequately include differentiating it from attempted suicide and other mental disorders, as well as understanding the motivations for self-injury and the context in which it occurs. This accessible and practical book provides therapists and students with a clear understanding of these key issues, as well as of suitable assessment techniques. It then goes on to delineate research-informed treatment approaches for NSSI, with an emphasis on functional assessment, emotion regulation, and problem solving, including motivational interviewing, interpersonal skills, CBT, DBT, behavioral management strategies, delay behaviors, exercise, family therapy, risk management, and medication, as well as how to successfully combine methods.

Download or read book State Mental Hospitals and the Elderly written by American Psychiatric Association. Task Force on Geriatric Psychiatry in the Public Mental Health Sector and published by Association. This book was released on 1993 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "By 1987, elderly patients comprised nearly one-fifth of all residents of state and county mental hospitals. During the past three decades, the deinstitutionalization movement has profoundly altered the care of elderly patients in state and county mental hospitals. In this task force report, leaders in the fields of geriatrics and long-term care present an overview of state-run mental hospitals. This report recommends the establishment of efficient, high-quality, and appropriately targeted state mental hospital services for elderly patients that will lead to the development of a comprehensive psychogeriatric care system." "State Mental Hospitals and the Elderly presents a review of the history and current status of care of elderly patients, the barriers that exist to improving psychogeriatric services, paradigms of psychogeriatric inpatient care, the role state hospitals play in the care of mentally ill elderly patients, the responsibilities of state mental hospitals for elderly patients with Alzheimer's disease and related disorders, training opportunities at state hospitals for residents and fellows in geriatric psychiatry, and recommendations for action needed to improve geriatric care for elderly patients."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Download or read book Refusing Care written by Elyn R. Saks and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-02-15 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has been said that how a society treats its least well-off members speaks volumes about its humanity. If so, our treatment of the mentally ill suggests that American society is inhumane: swinging between overintervention and utter neglect, we sometimes force extreme treatments on those who do not want them, and at other times discharge mentally ill patients who do want treatment without providing adequate resources for their care in the community. Focusing on overinterventionist approaches, Refusing Care explores when, if ever, the mentally ill should be treated against their will. Basing her analysis on case and empirical studies, Elyn R. Saks explores dilemmas raised by forced treatment in three contexts—civil commitment (forced hospitalization for noncriminals), medication, and seclusion and restraints. Saks argues that the best way to solve each of these dilemmas is, paradoxically, to be both more protective of individual autonomy and more paternalistic than current law calls for. For instance, while Saks advocates relaxing the standards for first commitment after a psychotic episode, she also would prohibit extreme mechanical restraints (such as tying someone spread-eagled to a bed). Finally, because of the often extreme prejudice against the mentally ill in American society, Saks proposes standards that, as much as possible, should apply equally to non-mentally ill and mentally ill people alike. Mental health professionals, lawyers, disability rights activists, and anyone who wants to learn more about the way the mentally ill are treated—and ought to be treated—in the United States should read Refusing Care.

Download or read book A Draft Act Governing Hospitalization of the Mentally Ill written by National Institute of Mental Health (U.S.) and published by . This book was released on 1951 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book My Lovely Wife written by Mark Lukach and published by Bluebird. This book was released on 2018-06-26 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mark and Giulia's life together began as a storybook romance. They fell in love at eighteen, married at twenty-four, and were living their dream life in San Francisco. When Giulia was twenty-seven, she suffered a terrifying and unexpected psychotic break that landed her in the psych ward for nearly a month. One day she was vibrant and well-adjusted; the next she was delusional and suicidal, convinced that she was the devil and that her loved ones were not safe. All she wanted was to die. Eventually, Giulia fully recovered, and the couple had a son. But, soon after Jonas was born, Giulia had another breakdown, and then a third a few years after that. pushed to the edge of the abyss, everything the couple had once taken for granted was upended. A story of the fragility of the mind, and the tenacity of the human spirit, My Lovely Wife is, above all, a love story that raises profound questions: How do we care for the people we love? What and who do we live for? Breathtaking in its candor, radiant with compassion, and written with dazzling lyricism, Lukach's is an intensely personal odyssey through the harrowing years of his wife's mental illness, anchored by an abiding devotion to family that will affirm readers' faith in the power of love.

Download or read book Mad in America written by Robert Whitaker and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An updated edition of the classic history of schizophrenia in America, which gives voice to generations of patients who suffered through "cures" that only deepened their suffering and impaired their hope of recovery Schizophrenics in the United States currently fare worse than patients in the world's poorest countries. In Mad in America, medical journalist Robert Whitaker argues that modern treatments for the severely mentally ill are just old medicine in new bottles, and that we as a society are deeply deluded about their efficacy. The widespread use of lobotomies in the 1920s and 1930s gave way in the 1950s to electroshock and a wave of new drugs. In what is perhaps Whitaker's most damning revelation, Mad in America examines how drug companies in the 1980s and 1990s skewed their studies to prove that new antipsychotic drugs were more effective than the old, while keeping patients in the dark about dangerous side effects. A haunting, deeply compassionate book -- updated with a new introduction and prologue bringing in the latest medical treatments and trends -- Mad in America raises important questions about our obligations to the mad, the meaning of "insanity," and what we value most about the human mind.

Download or read book Public Health Law Research written by Alexander C. Wagenaar and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-05-08 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Public Health Law Research: Theory and Methods definitively explores the mechanisms, theories and models central to public health law research – a growing field dedicated to measuring and studying law as a central means for advancing public health. Editors Alexander C. Wagenaar and Scott Burris outline integrated theory drawn from numerous disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences; specific mechanisms of legal effect and guidelines for collecting and coding empirical datasets of statutory and case law; optimal research designs for randomized trials and natural experiments for public health law evaluation; and methods for qualitative and cost-benefit studies of law.. They also discuss the challenge of effectively translating the results of scientific evaluations into public health laws and highlight the impact of this growing field. “How exactly the law can best be used as a tool for protecting and enhancing the public’s health has long been the subject of solely opinion and anecdote. Enter Public Health Law Research, a discipline designed to bring the bright light of science to the relationships between law and health. This book is a giant step forward in illuminating that subject.” -- Stephen Teret, JD, MPH, Professor, Director, Center for Law and the Public's Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health “Wagenaar and Burris bring a dose of much needed rigor to the empirical study of which public health law interventions really matter, and which don’t.” -- Bernard S. Black, JD, Chabraja Professor, Northwestern University Law School and Kellogg School of Management Companion Web site: www.josseybass.com/go/wagenaar

Download or read book No Asylum written by Thomas A. Oleszczuk and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-07-27 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No Asylum is a quantitative assessment of the incidence of state repression via the peculiar institution of forced psychiatric hospitalization of evidently healthy Soviet dissidents. The book explains who was targeted and why, as the State used psychiatry to attempt to deflect, defuse, discredit or destroy the multifaceted dissident movement. Although new detentions virtually ceased as the Union fragmented, it is too early to write an epitaph for psychiatric abuse: political use of psychiatry could be revived in Russia.

Download or read book Rabbits for Food written by Binnie Kirshenbaum and published by Soho Press. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Master of razor-edged literary humor Binnie Kirshenbaum returns with her first novel in a decade, a devastating, laugh-out-loud funny story of a writer’s slide into depression and institutionalization. It’s New Year’s Eve, the holiday of forced fellowship, mandatory fun, and paper hats. While dining out with her husband and their friends, Kirshenbaum’s protagonist—an acerbic, mordantly witty, and clinically depressed writer—fully unravels. Her breakdown lands her in the psych ward of a prestigious New York hospital, where she refuses all modes of recommended treatment. Instead, she passes the time chronicling the lives of her fellow “lunatics” and writing a novel about what brought her there. Her story is a brilliant and brutally funny dive into the disordered mind of a woman who sees the world all too clearly. Propelled by razor-sharp comic timing and rife with pinpoint insights, Kirshenbaum examines what it means to be unloved and loved, to succeed and fail, to be at once impervious and raw. Rabbits for Food shows how art can lead us out of—or into—the depths of disconsolate loneliness and piercing grief. A bravura literary performance from one of our most indispensable writers.

Download or read book The Locked Ward written by Dennis O'Donnell and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-01-05 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An extraordinary account of life behind the locked doors of a secure psychiatric ward from a nurse who worked there for seven years. Dennis O'Donnell started work as an orderly in the Intensive Psychiatric Care Unit of a large hospital in Scotland in 2000. In his daily life he encountered fear, violence and despair but also a considerable amount of care and compassion. Recounting the stories of the patients he worked with, and those of his colleagues on the ward, here he examines major mental health conditions, methods of treatment - medication, how religion, sex, wealth, health and drugs can bear influence on mental health, the prevailing attitudes to psychiatric illness, the authorities, the professionals & society. What emerges is a document of humanity and humour, a remarkable memoir that sheds light on a world that still remains largely unknown. 'This is a superb study of people whose minds have gone wrong, and the art of caring for them' Evening Standard

Download or read book The Three Christs of Ypsilanti written by Milton Rokeach and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2011-04-19 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On July 1, 1959, at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Michigan, the social psychologist Milton Rokeach brought together three paranoid schizophrenics: Clyde Benson, an elderly farmer and alcoholic; Joseph Cassel, a failed writer who was institutionalized after increasingly violent behavior toward his family; and Leon Gabor, a college dropout and veteran of World War II. The men had one thing in common: each believed himself to be Jesus Christ. Their extraordinary meeting and the two years they spent in one another’s company serves as the basis for an investigation into the nature of human identity, belief, and delusion that is poignant, amusing, and at times disturbing. Displaying the sympathy and subtlety of a gifted novelist, Rokeach draws us into the lives of three troubled and profoundly different men who find themselves “confronted with the ultimate contradiction conceivable for human beings: more than one person claiming the same identity.”

Download or read book Inconvenient People written by Sarah Wise and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The phenomenon of false allegations of mental illness is as old as our first interactions as human beings. Every one of us has described some other person as crazy or insane, and most all of us have had periods, moments at least, of madness. But it took the confluence of the law and medical science, mad–doctors, alienists, priests and barristers, to raise the matter to a level of "science," capable of being used by conniving relatives, "designing families" and scheming neighbors to destroy people who found themselves in the way, people whose removal could provide their survivors with money or property or other less frivolous benefits. Girl Interrupted in only a recent example. And reversing this sort of diagnosis and incarceration became increasingly more difficult, as even the most temperate attempt to leave these "homes" or "hospitals" was deemed "crazy." Kept in a madhouse, one became a little mad, as Jack Nicholson and Ken Kesey explain in One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. In this sadly terrifying, emotionally moving, and occasionally hilarious book, twelve cases of contested lunacy are offered as examples of the shifting arguments regarding what constituted sanity and insanity. They offer unique insight into the fears of sexuality, inherited madness, greed and fraud, until public feeling shifted and turned against the rising alienists who would challenge liberty and freedom of people who were perhaps simply "difficult," but were turned into victims of this unscrupulous trade. This fascinating book is filled with stories almost impossible to believe but wildly engaging, a book one will not soon forget.