Download or read book THE PSYCH WARD NOTES written by Peter Schorr and published by . This book was released on 2021-08-22 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens when your first memories of life and conscious awareness centered around death and mental illness? You end up with a mental illness or illnesses. This book is an autobiography/documentary about Peter Vox, a retired school teacher and professional musician from Long Island, NY who has spent his life battling anxiety, depression and existential sadness. This book chronicles Peter's childhood, the origins of his mental illnesses, history with medications, decades spent in therapy, marriage, careers, journals written from psychiatric hospitals and theories on how to handle your own mental illness. Furthermore, it's also a book about learning from past mistakes, accepting your flaws, focusing on your positive attributes, accepting help from others and realizing that there are opportunities to start over in life if you are open minded and willing to make small changes. Along with chronicles of Peter's struggles are highly amusing anecdotes about Peter's life that show the happy go lucky person that lives somewhere in all of us.
Download or read book Psychiatric Ward Chronicles written by True George and published by . This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 55 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Details the experience of life taking place in a psychiatric ward. The accounts of the characters are based on their real-life counterparts. Description of who sponsors the Psychiatric institution; details the experience of the side effects of medication, inappropriate relationships, release, and readmittance; abandonment, frustration, race relations; rule violations; personality expressions; mother issues; delusionary expectations; suicide attempt and escape.
Download or read book Psych Ward Chronicles written by True George and published by . This book was released on 2019-11-15 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Details the experience of life taking place in a psychiatric ward. The accounts of the characters are based on their real-life counterparts. Description of who sponsors the Psychiatric institution; details the experience of the side effects of medication, inappropriate relationships, release, and readmittance; abandonment, frustration, race relations; rule violations; personality expressions; mother issues; delusionary expectations; suicide attempt and escaping.The human element of being emotionally disturbed coupled with mental illness and how individuals cope according to their situation.
Download or read book Crazy All the Time written by Frederick L. Covan and published by Fawcett. This book was released on 1995 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In CRAZY ALL THE TIME, Frederick L. Covan, Ph.D., chief psychologist at Bellevue Hospital, takes you behind the gates and into the psych ward of one of the world's most famous mental institutions. With razor-sharp insight and great compassion, Covan follows the lives of a group of young interns and the unforgettable patients they are committed to serve, including Brenda, a paranoid schizophrenic who claims she has slept with six presidents; Matthew, a silent, tormented young man who cut off his own penis with a pair of pinking shears; and Gloria, a severely depressed dermatologist with a panic reaction to the sight of skin. Balancing the delicate line between normalcy and pathology, theory and reality, CRAZY ALL THE TIME explores the dark moods and outrageous behaviors of both doctors and patients in a place where madness reigns and disorder is the order of the day. "A wonderful book . . . Superbly written . . . Nothing short of perfect." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review
Download or read book Psych Ward Chronicles II written by True George and published by Page Publishing Inc. This book was released on 2024-06-27 with total page 89 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ten short stories of the soap-opera environment in a state-sanctioned congregate care level II facility for the mentally ill, aka support house for independent living. The support house is privately owned and operated. Stories follow the challenges as experienced by residents and staff.
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 Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital written by Rusty Tagliareni and Christina Mathews and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2016 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital was more than a building; it embodied an entire era of uniquely American history, from the unparalleled humanitarian efforts of Dorothea Dix to the revolutionary architectural concepts of Thomas Story Kirkbride. After well over a century of service, Greystone was left abandoned in 2008. From the time it closed until its demolition in 2015, Greystone became the focal point of a passionate preservation effort that drew national attention and served to spark the public's interest in historical asylum preservation. Many of the images contained in this book were rescued from the basement of Greystone in 2002 and have never been seen by the public. They appear courtesy of the Morris Plains Museum and its staff, who spent many hours digitally archiving the photographs so that future generations may better know Greystone's history.
Download or read book Sometimes Amazing Things Happen written by Elizabeth Ford and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-04-25 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Executive Director of Mental Health for Correctional Services in New York City, comes a revelatory and deeply compassionate memoir that takes readers inside Bellevue, and brings to life the world—the system, the staff, and the haunting cases—that shaped one young psychiatrist as she learned how to doctor and how to love. Elizabeth Ford went through medical school unsure of where she belonged. It wasn’t until she did her psychiatry rotation that she found her calling—to care for one of the most vulnerable populations of mentally ill people, the inmates of New York's jails, including Rikers Island, who are so sick that they are sent to the Bellevue Hospital Prison Ward for care. These men were broken, unloved, without resources or support, and very ill. They could be violent, unpredictable, but they could also be funny and tender and needy. Mostly, they were human and they awakened in Ford a boundless compassion. Her patients made her a great doctor and a better person and, as she treated these men, she learned about doctoring, about nurturing, about parenting, and about love. While Ford was a psychiatrist at Bellevue she becomes a wife and a mother. In her book she shares her struggles to balance her life and her work, to care for her children and her patients, and to maintain the empathy that is essential to her practice—all in the face of a jaded institution, an exhausting workload, and the deeply emotionally taxing nature of her work. Ford brings humor, grace, and humanity to the lives of the patients in her care and in beautifully rendered prose illuminates the inner workings (and failings) of our mental health system, our justice system, and the prison system.
Download or read book State of Madness written by Rebecca Reich and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What madness meant was a fiercely contested question in Soviet society. State of Madness examines the politically fraught collision between psychiatric and literary discourses in the years after Joseph Stalin's death. State psychiatrists deployed set narratives of mental illness to pathologize dissenting politics and art. Dissidents such as Aleksandr Vol'pin, Vladimir Bukovskii, and Semen Gluzman responded by highlighting a pernicious overlap between those narratives and their life stories. The state, they suggested in their own psychiatrically themed texts, had crafted an idealized view of reality that itself resembled a pathological work of art. In their unsanctioned poetry and prose, the writers Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Siniavskii, and Venedikt Erofeev similarly engaged with psychiatric discourse to probe where creativity ended and insanity began. Together, these dissenters cast themselves as psychiatrists to a sick society. By challenging psychiatry's right to declare them or what they wrote insane, dissenters exposed as a self-serving fiction the state's renewed claims to rationality and modernity in the post-Stalin years. They were, as they observed, like the child who breaks the spell of collective delusion in Hans Christian Andersen's story "The Emperor's New Clothes." In a society where normality means insisting that the naked monarch is clothed, it is the truth-teller who is pathologized. Situating literature's encounter with psychiatry at the center of a wider struggle over authority and power, this bold interdisciplinary study will appeal to literary specialists; historians of culture, science, and medicine; and scholars and students of the Soviet Union and its legacy for Russia today.
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 Mental Ward written by Jennifer Loring and published by . This book was released on 2013-06-01 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sanatorium, mental ward, psychiatric hospital - they're all the same. Places where the infirm, the crazy, and the certifiable go for treatment... Or what passes for 'treatment'. This is a collection of stories of bedlam taking place within the padded walls of an institution. Stories of experiments gone wrong, patients revolting against the staff, or even the deranged doings of those charged with giving care. They are sick, depraved, and atrocious - the type of stories that rarely reach the light of day. Are you brave enough to crawl inside the minds of the twelve authors who wrote these tales... Or are you afraid you'll be locked up for peeking?
Download or read book The Lives They Left Behind written by Darby Penney and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2010-02 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than four hundred abandoned suitcases filled with patients' belongings were found when Willard Psychiatric Center closed in 1995 after 125 years of operation. In this fully-illustrated social history, they are skillfully examined and compared to the written record to create a moving-and devastating-group portrait of twentieth-century American psychiatric care.
Download or read book American Psychosis written by E. Fuller Torrey and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-08-22 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1963, President John F. Kennedy delivered an historic speech on mental illness and retardation. He described sweeping new programs to replace "the shabby treatment of the many millions of the mentally disabled in custodial institutions" with treatment in community mental health centers. This movement, later referred to as "deinstitutionalization," continues to impact mental health care. Though he never publicly acknowledged it, the program was a tribute to Kennedy's sister Rosemary, who was born mildly retarded and developed a schizophrenia-like illness. Terrified she'd become pregnant, Joseph Kennedy arranged for his daughter to receive a lobotomy, which was a disaster and left her severely retarded. Fifty years after Kennedy's speech, E. Fuller Torrey's book provides an inside perspective on the birth of the federal mental health program. On staff at the National Institute of Mental Health when the program was being developed and implemented, Torrey draws on his own first-hand account of the creation and launch of the program, extensive research, one-on-one interviews with people involved, and recently unearthed audiotapes of interviews with major figures involved in the legislation. As such, this book provides historical material previously unavailable to the public. Torrey examines the Kennedys' involvement in the policy, the role of major players, the responsibility of the state versus the federal government in caring for the mentally ill, the political maneuverings required to pass the legislation, and how closing institutions resulted not in better care - as was the aim - but in underfunded programs, neglect, and higher rates of community violence. Many now wonder why public mental illness services are so ineffective. At least one-third of the homeless are seriously mentally ill, jails and prisons are grossly overcrowded, largely because the seriously mentally ill constitute 20 percent of prisoners, and public facilities are overrun by untreated individuals. As Torrey argues, it is imperative to understand how we got here in order to move forward towards providing better care for the most vulnerable.
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 Bedlam written by Kenneth Paul Rosenberg and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A psychiatrist and award-winning documentarian sheds light on the mental-health-care crisis in the United States. When Dr. Kenneth Rosenberg trained as a psychiatrist in the late 1980s, the state mental hospitals, which had reached peak occupancy in the 1950s, were being closed at an alarming rate, with many patients having nowhere to go. There has never been a more important time for this conversation, as one in five adults--40 million Americans--experiences mental illness each year. Today, the largest mental institution in the United States is the Los Angeles County Jail, and the last refuge for many of the 20,000 mentally ill people living on the streets of Los Angeles is L.A. County Hospital. There, Dr. Rosenberg begins his chronicle of what it means to be mentally ill in America today, integrating his own moving story of how the system failed his sister, Merle, who had schizophrenia. As he says, "I have come to see that my family's tragedy, my family's shame, is America's great secret." Dr. Rosenberg gives readers an inside look at the historical, political, and economic forces that have resulted in the greatest social crisis of the twenty-first century. The culmination of a seven-year inquiry, Bedlam is not only a rallying cry for change, but also a guidebook for how we move forward with care and compassion, with resources that have never before been compiled, including legal advice, practical solutions for parents and loved ones, help finding community support, and information on therapeutic options.
Download or read book The Patient written by Jasper DeWitt and published by Houghton Mifflin. This book was released on 2020 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Silent Patient by way of Stephen King: Parker, a young, overconfident psychiatrist new to his job at a mental asylum, miscalculates catastrophically when he undertakes curing a mysterious and profoundly dangerous patient. In a series of online posts, Parker H., a young psychiatrist, chronicles the harrowing account of his time working at a dreary mental hospital in New England. Through this internet message board, Parker hopes to communicate with the world his effort to cure one bewildering patient. We learn, as Parker did on his first day at the hospital, of the facility's most difficult, profoundly dangerous case--a forty-year-old man who was originally admitted to the hospital at age six. This patient has no known diagnosis. His symptoms seem to evolve over time. Every person who has attempted to treat him has been driven to madness or suicide. Desperate and fearful, the hospital's directors keep him strictly confined and allow minimal contact with staff for their own safety, convinced that releasing him would unleash catastrophe on the outside world. Parker, brilliant and overconfident, takes it upon himself to discover what ails this mystery patient and finally cure him. But from his first encounter with the mystery patient, things spiral out of control, and, facing a possibility beyond his wildest imaginings, Parker is forced to question everything he thought he knew. Fans of Sarah Pinborough's Behind Her Eyes and Paul Tremblay's The Cabin at the End of the World will be riveted by Jasper DeWitt's astonishing debut.
Download or read book The Book of Woe written by Gary Greenberg and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Gary Greenberg has become the Dante of our psychiatric age, and the DSM-5 is his Inferno.” —Errol Morris Since its debut in 1952, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has set down the “official” view on what constitutes mental illness. Homosexuality, for instance, was a mental illness until 1973. Each revision has created controversy, but the DSM-5 has taken fire for encouraging doctors to diagnose more illnesses—and to prescribe sometimes unnecessary or harmful medications. Respected author and practicing psychotherapist Gary Greenberg embedded himself in the war that broke out over the fifth edition, and returned with an unsettling tale. Exposing the deeply flawed process behind the DSM-5’s compilation, The Book of Woe reveals how the manual turns suffering into a commodity—and made the APA its own biggest beneficiary.
