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 History Lessons written by Clifton Crais and published by Harry N. Abrams. This book was released on 2015-05-19 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An acclaimed scholar tackles his greatest historical puzzle yet--his own abused past and tortured memory
Download or read book Welcome to My Country written by Lauren Slater and published by Anchor. This book was released on 1997-07-14 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lauren Slater, a brilliant writer who is a young therapist, takes us on a mesmerizing personal and professional journey in this remarkable memoir about her work with mental and emotional illness. The territory of the mind and of madness can seem a foreign, even frightening place-until you read Welcome to My Country. Writing in a powerful and original voice, Lauren Slater closes the distance between "us" and "them," transporting us into the country of Lenny, Moxi, Oscar, and Marie. She lets us watch as she interacts with and strives to understand patients suffering from mental and emotional distress-the schizophrenic, the depressed, the suicidal. As the young psychologist responds to, reflects on, and re-creates her interactions with the inner realities of the dispossessed, she moves us to a deeper understanding of the complexities of the human mind and spirit. And then, in a stunning final chapter, the psychologist confronts herself, when she is asked to treat a young woman, bulimic and suicidal, who is on the same ward where Slater herself was once such a patient. Like An Unquiet Mind, Listening to Prozac and Girl, Interrupted, Welcome to My Country is a beautifully written, captivating, and revealing book, an unusual personal and professional memoir that brings us closer to understanding ourselves, one another, and the human condition.
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 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 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 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 Committed written by Paolina Milana and published by She Writes Press. This book was released on 2021-05-04 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After a decade of caring for crazy and keeping her mother’s mental illness a secret from the outside world, twenty-year-old Paolina Milana longs for just one year free from the madness of her home. When she gets the chance to go to an out-of-state school, she takes it, but her family won’t leave her be. Letter after letter arrives, constantly reminding her of the insanity rooted in her family tree. Even worse, the voices in her own head whisper words she’s not sure are normal. “Please don’t make me be like Mamma,” she prays to a God she’s not sure is listening. The unexpected death of her father soon after she returns home leaves Paolina in shock—and in charge of her paranoid schizophrenic mother. But it isn’t until she is twenty-seven and her sister two years her junior explodes in a psychotic episode and, just like Mamma, is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and must be committed, that Paolina descends into her own despair, nearly losing herself to the darkness. Poignant and impactful, Committed is one woman’s story of resilience as she struggles to stay sane despite the madness that surrounds her.
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 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 Memoirs of My Nervous Illness written by Daniel Paul Schreber and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2000-01-31 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1884, the distinguished German jurist Daniel Paul Schreber suffered the first of a series of mental collapses that would afflict him for the rest of his life. In his madness, the world was revealed to him as an enormous architecture of nerves, dominated by a predatory God. It became clear to Schreber that his personal crisis was implicated in what he called a "crisis in God's realm," one that had transformed the rest of humanity into a race of fantasms. There was only one remedy; as his doctor noted: Schreber "considered himself chosen to redeem the world, and to restore to it the lost state of Blessedness. This, however, he could only do by first being transformed from a man into a woman...."
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 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 Mind on Fire written by Arnold Thomas Fanning and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2019-04-23 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize 2019 '[A] painfully intense, courageous and gripping account of [Fanning's] journey to the underworld of madness and back. This is a brave and instructive book.' Irish Times 'Extraordinary. An account of mental illness, grief, delusions, homelessness, a fractured family relationship ... and all while trying to recover and create. Superb writing on a frequently difficult subject.' Sinéad Gleeson Arnold Thomas Fanning had his first experience of depression during adolescence, following the death of his mother. Some ten years later, an up-and-coming playwright, he was overcome by mania and delusions. Thus began a terrible period in which he was often suicidal, increasingly disconnected from family and friends, sometimes in trouble with the law, and homeless in London. Drawing on his own memories, the recollections of people who knew him when he was at his worst, and medical and police records, Arnold Thomas Fanning has produced a beautifully written, devastatingly intense account of madness - and recovery, to the point where he has not had any serious illness for over a decade and has become an acclaimed playwright. Fanning conveys the consciousness of a person living with mania, psychosis and severe depression with a startling precision and intimacy. Mind on Fire is the gripping, sometimes harrowing, and ultimately uplifting testament of a person who has visited hellish regions of the mind. 'Arnold Thomas Fanning offers the most vivid and unflinching window into the mind of someone who is in the throes of madness ... It was like nothing I'd read before' Rick Edwards 'Mind on Fire is a truly powerful, arresting, haunting account. Arnold Thomas Fanning has reckoned with the darkest matter of his heart and mind, and I challenge anyone not to be moved by that.' Sara Baume, author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither and A Line Made by Walking 'In this strange and singular book, Arnold Thomas Fanning mercilessly excavates the infernal underworld of his own years of madness. As reminiscent as it occasionally is of John Healy's The Grass Arena, and even of Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, the book is ultimately not quite like anything else I've read, and brought me as close to the lived reality of mental illness as I have ever been. It's a significant achievement: a painful, inexorable work of autobiography, whose existence is its own form of redemption.' Mark O'Connell, Baillie Gifford Prize-shortlisted author of To Be a Machine 'This is an extraordinary memoir about how it feels to be depressed, delusional, desperate' The Observer 'Incredibly important' Emilie Pine, author of Notes to Self 'A ratcheting pace, a tight first-person immediacy, and utterly staggering to be a passenger over its entire warped course ... An indelible, ground-shaking account' Hilary A White, Irish Independent, Memoir of the Year, Best Reads of 2018 'A spellbinding memoir that should prove both moving and hopefully cathartic for the reader.' RTE Culture 'Told in tight and immediate first-person, and imbued with a startling momentum that ratchets unnervingly, Fanning's publishing debut ... is a significant achievement and should be a talking point in publishing this year.' Irish Independent 'Fanning's debut book lays it on the line in a deeply personal and compelling chronicle of his descent into depression and his way back out.' RTE Guide 'Wonderful' Joseph O'Connor, Irish Times Books of the Year 'Unsparingly direct, searing and honest ... It is gripping to read and must have been exhausting to live' Medical Independent 'One of the most gripping and revealing memoirs I've read in a long time. A controlled and artful exploration of absolute loss of control, an unsettling and at times very moving reconstruction of a period of serious mental illness, Mind on Fire is a beautiful book about a terrifying thing.' Mark O'Connell, Irish Times Books of the Year 'Gripping' Sinéad Gleeson, Irish Times Books of the Year 'Shocking' Liz Nugent, Irish Times Books of the Year 'Poignant, beautifully detailed memoir' Sarah Gilmartin, Irish Times, Best debuts of 2018 'Brave and illuminating' Sunday Business Post 'This is the type of account that not only grips you wholesale as the pages flitter past, it also changes your very perception of psychology' Hilary A White, Sunday Independent Memoir of the Year
Download or read book Hearing Voices written by Eric Coates and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2012 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I remember an instance at one point, during my late twenties or early thirties, when I wondered what it would be like to hear voices. At that time I was slightly acquainted with a schizophrenic named Mike, who told me that he had Jesus in his head. That was his hallucination. Jesus talked to him, apparently. I remember wondering at the time what it would be like to have Jesus talking in my head. What would it be like, I wondered, to be schizophrenic for a day? It turned out to be more terrifying than I ever imagined.
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.
