Download or read book Madness a Memoir written by Kate Richards and published by Penguin Group Australia. This book was released on 2013-01-19 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature 2014 nonfiction prize. Shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards 2013 nonficiton prize. It's not every day you get to admit you're mad. The thing with psychosis is that when I'm sick I believe the delusional stuff to the same degree that you might know the sky is above and the earth below. And if someone were to say to me that the delusional thinking is, in fact, delusional, well that's the same as if I assure you now that we walk on the sky. Of course you wouldn't believe me, and that's why it's sometimes so hard for people who are sick like this to know that they need treatment. Psychosis and severe depression have a huge effect on how you relate to other people and how you see the world. It's a bit like being in a vacuum, or behind a wall of really thick glass . . . you lose any sense of connectedness. You're cast adrift from everyone and everything that matters. I've lived with acute psychosis and depression for the best part of twenty years. This is the story of my journey from chaos to balance, and from limbo to meaning. Kate Richards is a trained doctor currently working in medical research. 'Demands to be read' Sunday Age 'Heart wrenching, mind bending' Daily Telegraph 'A mysteriously beautiful book' Michael McGirr, The Age 'A gifted writer and storyteller' Courier-Mail 'Astonishing' Herald Sun
Download or read book Art and Madness written by Anne Roiphe and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2012-03-06 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coming of age on Park Avenue in the 1950s, Anne Roiphe had an adolescence entrenched in privilege, petticoats, and social rules. Young women at the time were expected to give up personal freedom for devotion to home and children. Instead, Roiphe chose Beckett, Proust, Sartre, and Mann as her heroes, and became one of the girls draped across the sofa at parties with George Plimpton, Norman Mailer, and William Styron, sometimes with her young child in tow. For a time she was satisfied to play the muse, but at the age of twenty-seven, divorced and finally freed of the notion that any sacrifice was worth making for art, she began to write. Here, in her clear-sighted, perceptive, and unabashed memoir, Roiphe shares with astonishing honesty the tumultuous adventure of self-discovery that finally led to her redemption.
Download or read book Girl Interrupted written by Susanna Kaysen and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-06-19 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 30th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she'd never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital. Her memoir of the next two years is a "poignant, honest ... triumphantly funny ... and heartbreaking story" (The New York Times Book Review). WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR The ward for teenage girls in the McLean psychiatric hospital was as renowned for its famous clientele—Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles—as for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary. Kaysen's memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. It is a brilliant evocation of a "parallel universe" set within the kaleidoscopically shifting landscape of the late sixties. Girl, Interrupted is a clear-sighted, unflinching document that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.
Download or read book A Can of Madness written by Jason Pegler and published by Chipmunkapublishing ltd. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is one of the most honest autobiography's ever written on manic depression takes you as close to the manic mind as you can possibly get.Jason Pegler is a writer, public speaker and consultant on mental health. He works with the media, the government and mental health organisations to empower survivors and reduce stigma and discrimination. He plans to take his mental health story to Hollywood and break down the mental health taboo once and for all.
Download or read book Madness Made Me written by Mary O'Hagan and published by Openbox. This book was released on 2014 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After her journey through madness Mary O'Hagan realised the mental health system and society did more harm than good. 'Madness Made Me' is a myth-busting account of madness and our customary responses to it through the lens of lived experience. O'Hagan's journey took her from the psychiatric hospital to the United Nations and many places in between as a leader in the international mad movement. Her fundamental message is that madness is profoundly disruptive but full human experience. The trouble is most people don't see it that way, from the experts who make up clever theories about brain disease to the people down the road who have irrational fears about mad axe-murderers. 'Madness Made Me' is a compelling and beautifully written book that uncovers widespread injustice. It ends with vision for a world that holds hope for people with mental distress and treats them with respect and humanity.
Download or read book Inferno written by Catherine Cho and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice "Inferno is a disturbing and masterfully told memoir, but it’s also an important one that pushes back against powerful taboos. . ." --The New York Times Book Review "Explosive" --Good Morning America "Sublime" --Bookpage (starred review) When Catherine Cho and her husband set off from London to introduce their newborn son to family scattered across the United States, she could not have imagined what lay in store. Before the trip’s end, she develops psychosis, a complete break from reality, which causes her to lose all sense of time and place, including what is real and not real. In desperation, her husband admits her to a nearby psychiatric hospital, where she begins the hard work of rebuilding her identity. In this unwaveringly honest, insightful, and often shocking memoir Catherine reconstructs her sense of self, starting with her childhood as the daughter of Korean immigrants, moving through a traumatic past relationship, and on to the early years of her courtship with and marriage to her husband, James. She masterfully interweaves these parts of her past with a vivid, immediate recounting of the days she spent in the ward. The result is a powerful exploration of psychosis and motherhood, at once intensely personal, yet holding within it a universal experience – of how we love, live and understand ourselves in relation to each other.
Download or read book After the Madness written by Sol Wachtler and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-04-29 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Driving down the Long Island Expressway in November of 1992, Sol Wachtler was New York’s chief judge and heir apparent to the New York governorship. Suddenly, three van loads of FBI agents swerved in front of him—bringing his car and his legal career to a halt. Wachtler's subsequent arrest, conviction, and incarceration for harassing his longtime lover precipitated a media feeding frenzy, revealing to the world his struggles with romantic attachment, manic depression, and drug abuse. In this, his prison diary, Wachtler reveals the stark reality behind his vertiginous fall from the heights of the legal establishment to the underbelly of the criminal justice system. Sentenced to a medium security prison in Butner, North Carolina, Wachtler is stabbed by an unseen assailant, berated by prison guards, and repeatedly placed in solitary confinement with no explanation. Moreover, as a prisoner he confronts firsthand the inequities of a system his judicial rulings helped to construct and befriends the type of people he once sentenced. With unflinching honesty, Wachtler draws on his unique experience of living life on both sides of the bench to paint a chilling portrait of prison life interwoven with a no‐holds‐barred analysis of the shortcomings of the American legal justice system.
Download or read book Gorilla and the Bird written by Zack McDermott and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2017-09-26 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Soon to be an HBO limited series* "Glorious...one of the best memoirs I've read in years...a tragicomic gem about family, class, race, justice, and the spectacular weirdness of Wichita. [McDermott] can move from barely controlled hilarity to the brink of rage to aching tenderness in a single breath."--Marya Hornbacher, New York Times Book Review Zack McDermott, a 26-year-old Brooklyn public defender, woke up one morning convinced he was being filmed, Truman Show-style, as part of an audition for a TV pilot. Every passerby was an actor; every car would magically stop for him; everything he saw was a cue from "The Producer" to help inspire the performance of a lifetime. After a manic spree around Manhattan, Zack, who is bipolar, was arrested on a subway platform and admitted to Bellevue Hospital. So begins the story of Zack's freefall into psychosis and his desperate, poignant, often hilarious struggle to claw his way back to sanity. It's a journey that will take him from New York City back to his Kansas roots and to the one person who might be able to save him, his tough, big-hearted Midwestern mother, nicknamed the Bird, whose fierce and steadfast love is the light in Zack's dark world. Before his odyssey is over, Zack will be tackled by guards in mental wards, run naked through cornfields, receive secret messages from the TV, befriend a former Navy Seal and his talking stuffed monkey, and see the Virgin Mary in the whorls of his own back hair. But with the Bird's help, he just might have a shot at pulling through, starting over, and maybe even meeting a partner who can love him back, bipolar and all. Introducing an electrifying new voice, GORILLA AND THE BIRD is a raw and unforgettable account of a young man's unraveling and the relationship that saves him.
Download or read book Surrounded By Madness written by Rachel Pruchno and published by . This book was released on 2020-09-28 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "What was the likelihood my adopted daughter would have my father's hazel eyes and my mother's mental illness?" In this fiercely candid memoir, Dr. Pruchno, a scientist widely acclaimed for her research on mental illness and families, shows how mental illness threatened to destroy her own family. Not once, but twice. As a child, she didn't understand her mother's episodes of crippling sadness or whirlwind activity. As a mother, she feared her daughter Sophie would follow in the footsteps of the grandmother Sophie never knew. Unraveling the mysteries of her mother's and daughter's illnesses, Pruchno fought to preserve her marriage and protect her son. But it was not until she came to terms with her own secrets that she truly understood the destructive and pervasive effects mental illness has on families. Surrounded By Madness is transforming. It will empower families to stop hiding and start talking when mental illness strikes.
Download or read book The Last Asylum written by Barbara Taylor and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-04-15 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late 1970s, Barbara Taylor, then an acclaimed young historian, began to suffer from severe anxiety. In the years that followed, Taylor's world contracted around her illness. Eventually, she was admitted to what had once been England's largest psychiatric institutions, the infamous Friern Mental Hospital in London
Download or read book A Time Of Madness written by Salman Rashid and published by Rupa Publications. This book was released on 2017 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the chaos of partition in 1947, something dreadful happened in the city of Jalandhar in Punjab. As a result of this, Salman Rashid's family fled Jalandhar for Pakistan, the newly created country across the border. They were among the nearly two million people uprooted from their homes in the greatest transmigration in history. Besides those who fled, other members of the family became part of a grimmer statistic: They featured among the more than one million unfortunate souls who paid with their lives for the division of India and creation of Pakistan. After living in the shadow of his family's tragedy for decades, in 2008, Rashid made the journey back to his ancestral village to uncover the truth. A time of madness tells the story of what he discovered with great poignancy and grace. It is a tale of unspeakable brutality but it is also a testament to the uniquely human traits of forgiveness, redemption and the resilience of the human spirit.
Download or read book Nola written by Robin Hemley and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2013-04-01 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The evidence at hand: an autobiography—complete with their mother’s edits—written by his brilliant and disturbingly religious sister; a story featuring actual childhood events, but published by his mother as fiction; the transcript of a hypnotherapy session from his adolescence; and perjured court documents hidden in a drawer for decades. These are the clues Robin Hemley gathers when he sets out to reconstruct the life of his older sister Nola, who died at the age of twenty-five after several years of treatment for schizophrenia. Armed with these types of clues, Hemley quickly discovers that finding the truth in any life—even one’s own—is a fragmented and complex task. Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness is much more than a remembrance of a young woman who was consumed her entire life by a passion for finding and understanding God; it is also a quest to understand what people choose to reveal and conceal, and an examination of the enormous toll mental illness takes on a family. Finally, it is a revelation of the alchemy that creates a writer: confidence in the unknowable, distrust of the proven, tortuous devotion to the fine print in life, and sacrifice to writing itself as it plays the roles of confessor, scourge, and creator. Upon its first release in 1998, Nola won ForeWord’s Book of the Year Award for biography/memoir, the Washington State Book Award for biography/memoir, and the Independent Press Book Award for autobiography/memoir.
Download or read book Instrumental written by James Rhodes and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A mesmeric combination of vivid, keen, obsessive precision and raw, urgent energy.” --Zoe Williams, Guardian “Thrilling and harrowing . . . Unsurpassed and unsurpassable.” --Sunday Times James Rhodes's passion for music has been his lifeline--the thread that has held through a life encompassing abuse and turmoil. But whether listening to Rachmaninov on a loop as a traumatized teenager or discovering a Bach adagio while in a hospital ward, he survived his demons by encounters with musical miracles. These--along with a chance encounter with a stranger--inspired him to become the renowned concert pianist he is today. Instrumental is a memoir like no other: unapologetically candid, boldly outspoken, and surprisingly funny--shot through with a mordant wit, even in its darkest moments. A feature film adaptation of Rhodes's incredible story is now in development from Monumental Pictures and BBC Films, following a competitive bidding war involving major U.S. and U.K. companies. An impassioned tribute to the therapeutic powers of music, Instrumental also weaves in fascinating facts about how classical music actually works and about the extraordinary lives of some of the great composers. It explains why and how music has the potential to transform all of our lives.
Download or read book Another Kind of Madness written by Stephen Hinshaw and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2017-06-20 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Parallel to An Unquiet Mind and The Glass Castle, a deeply personal memoir calling for the destigmatization of mental illness
Download or read book A Memoir of Love and Madness written by Rahla Xenopoulos and published by Penguin Random House South Africa. This book was released on 2011-03-28 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1992, Rahla Xenopoulos was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Despite the devastating diagnosis, she sought education on her affliction. Although she found an abundance of literature on various mental illnesses, none of it seemed applicable to her. This situation inspired her to write a book chronicling her ongoing efforts to come to terms with a disease that is, in effect, a life sentence. The book recounts her upbringing in an eccentric, loving Jewish family, her struggle with bulimia, anorexia and self-mutilation, her attempts at suicide, finding true love and, finally, the ‘crazy, utterly unpredictable experience of giving birth to triplets’. This is neither a self-help book nor a medical guide. Reading this book will not cure anyone; bipolar disorder is a chronic illness. But it did help Rahla - as it will countless others - ‘to understand the rhythm in the cacophony of this condition’.
Download or read book The Madness of Grief written by Richard Coles and published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. This book was released on 2021-04-01 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'Immensely moving and disarmingly witty' Nigella Lawson 'Such a moving, tough, funny, raw, honest read' Matt Haig 'Beautifully written, moving and gut-wrenching, but also at times very funny' Ian Rankin 'Captures brilliantly, beautifully, bravely the comedy as well as the tragedy of bereavement' The Times 'Will strike a chord with anyone who has grieved' Independent Whether it is pastoral care for the bereaved, discussions about the afterlife, or being called out to perform the last rites, death is part of the Reverend Richard Coles's life and work. But when his partner the Reverend David Coles died, shortly before Christmas in 2019, much about death took Coles by surprise. For one thing, David's death at the early age of forty-three was unexpected. The man that so often assists others to examine life's moral questions now found himself in need of help. He began to look to others for guidance to steer him through his grief. The flock was leading the shepherd. Much about grief surprised him: the volume of 'sadmin' you have to do when someone dies, how much harder it is travelling for work alone, even the pain of typing a text message to your partner - then realising you are alone. The Reverend Richard Coles's deeply personal account of life after grief will resonate, unforgettably, with anyone who has lost a loved one.
Download or read book Into the Woods and Out Again written by Dina Glouberman and published by Sphinx Publishing. This book was released on 2018-06 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 1971 was the year Dina Glouberman went mad. Now, for the first time, Dr Dina Glouberman, renowned psychotherapist and author, co-founder of the world–famous Skyros Holidays, creator of Imagework therapy, and author of The Joy of Burnout, writes with candour and humour about a spell in a psychiatric ward. Indeed, she describes it as enlivening and enlightening, a catalyst for her rich and creative life. This memoir traces the journey from those wild and intense weeks in the Middlesex Hospital through five years of “normal life” and then on to twelve years of extraordinary creativity, when she had two babies, co-founded Skyros Holidays on a Greek island, pioneered her Imagework approach to therapy and personal development, had a life-changing spiritual experience, faced the loss of her father and brother, and wrote her first book. At the end of this book, a new cycle is just beginning, as she burns out, dismantles her marriage and her life, and discovers what is next. This remarkable memoir is a revealing meditation on the behind-the-scenes world of therapy and psychoanalysis in the 1960s, as well as on marriage, mothering, madness, imagination, aloneness, community and spirituality. Into the Woods and Out Again captures the inner life of a woman who has played a major role in the contemporary holistic and therapeutic world.
