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 The Border of Paradise written by Esme Weijun Wang and published by UNNAMED Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tells the story of the neurotic David Nowak who lives with his wife and children in the Northern California wilderness giving his family an insular and idyllic existence.

Download or read book A Road Back from Schizophrenia written by Arnhild Lauveng and published by Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.. This book was released on 2012-11-13 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For ten years, Arnhild Lauveng suffered as a schizophrenic, going in and out of the hospital for months or even a year at a time. A Road Back from Schizophrenia gives extraordinary insight into the logic (and life) of a schizophrenic. Lauveng illuminates her loss of identity, her sense of being controlled from the outside, and her relationship to the voices she heard and her sometimes terrifying hallucinations. Painful recollections of moments of humiliation inflicted by thoughtless medical professionals are juxtaposed with Lauveng’s own understanding of how such patients are outwardly irrational and often violent. She paints a surreal world—sometimes full of terror and sometimes of beauty—in which “the Captain” rules her by the rod and the school’s corridors are filled with wolves. When she was diagnosed with the mental illness, it was emphasized that this was a congenital disease, and that she would have to live with it for the rest of her life. Today, however, she calls herself a “former schizophrenic,” has stopped taking medication for the illness, and currently works as a clinical psychologist. Lauveng, though sometimes critical of mental health care, ultimately attributes her slow journey back to health to the dedicated medical staff who took the time to talk to her and who saw her as a person simply diagnosed with an illness—not the illness incarnate. A powerful memoir for sufferers, their families, and the professionals who care for them.

Download or read book The Crying Book written by Heather Christle and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER "A poignant and piercing examination of the phenomenon of tears—exhaustive, yes, but also open-ended. . . A deeply felt, and genuinely touching, book." —Esmé Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias "Spellbinding and propulsive—the map of a luminous mind in conversation with books, songs, friends, scientific theories, literary histories, her own jagged joy, and despair. Heather Christle is a visionary writer." —Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks This bestselling "lyrical, moving book: part essay, part memoir, part surprising cultural study" is an examination of why we cry, how we cry, and what it means to cry from a woman on the cusp of motherhood confronting her own depression (The New York Times Book Review). Heather Christle has just lost a dear friend to suicide and now must reckon with her own depression and the birth of her first child. As she faces her grief and impending parenthood, she decides to research the act of crying: what it is and why people do it, even if they rarely talk about it. Along the way, she discovers an artist who designed a frozen–tear–shooting gun and a moth that feeds on the tears of other animals. She researches tear–collecting devices (lachrymatories) and explores the role white women’s tears play in racist violence. Honest, intelligent, rapturous, and surprising, Christle’s investigations look through a mosaic of science, history, and her own lived experience to find new ways of understanding life, loss, and mental illness. The Crying Book is a deeply personal tribute to the fascinating strangeness of tears and the unexpected resilience of joy.

Download or read book Schizoaffective Disorder Simplified written by Martine Daniel and published by Chipmunkapublishing ltd. This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DescriptionSchizoaffective disorder is a condition which shares symptoms with both bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, and which affects as many as 1 in 200 people - 0.5% of the population. Surprisingly, there have been few books written about schizoaffective disorder, and even fewer aimed at the general reader. Until now. Schizoaffective Disorder Simplified is your comprehensive and up-to-date guide to schizoaffective disorder, featuring an introduction to the condition, its symptoms, its treatment and various ways that people can learn to manage their illness, as well as a series of helpful worksheets for people with schizoaffective disorder. Aimed at the general reader, whether you have schizoaffective disorder, care for someone with the illness or just have a curious interest in the subject, this book will answer all your questions about schizoaffective disorder, and give you an insight into what it is like to live with mania, depression and psychosis. About the AuthorMartine Daniel was born in York in 1981. From a young age, she knew she wanted to be a writer, and whilst at secondary school she would often be caught scribbling stories in the back of exercise books during lessons. Her dreams of seeing her name in print never dimmed, despite her life being turned upside down by episodes of mania, depression and psychosis during her late teens and early twenties.In 2003 the pressures of a stressful job brought on an episode of psychotic mania, which led to the breakdown that ended her hopes of a career in bookselling, following which Martine was finally forced into contact with local mental health services. With the help of medication and the support of her family, she began to pick up the pieces of her life and started work on her first novel The Fire in Your Eyes (published 2009), juggling work on the novel with her studies with The Open University. Her second novel, Legacy of Lies, the sequel to The Fire in Your Eyes, and her third novel, Wading the Waters of my Mind, were both published in 2010. Martine is a keen supporter of the Time to Change campaign and hopes that her writing can help to put an end to the stigma of mental illness.

Download or read book Mind Without a Home written by Kristina Morgan and published by Hazelden Publishing. This book was released on 2013-09-03 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Experience the inner world of a woman with schizophrenia in this brutally honest, lyrical memoir. Have you ever wondered what it is like in the mind of a person with Schizophrenia? How can one survive day after day unable to distinguish between one’s inner nightmares and the everyday realities that most of us take for granted? In her brutally honest, highly original memoir, Kristina Morgan takes us inside her head to experience the chaos, fragmented thinking, and the startling creativity of the schizophrenic mind. With the intimacy of private journal-like entries and the language of a poet, she carries us from her childhood to her teen years when hallucinations began to hijack her mind and into adulthood where she began abusing alcohol to temper the punishing voices that only she could hear. This is no formulaic tale of tragedy and triumph: We feel Kristina’s hope as she pursues an education and career and begins to build strong family connections, friendships and intimacy—and her devastation as the insistent voices convince her to throw it all away, destroying herself and alienating everyone around her. Woven through the pages of her life are stories of recovery from alcoholism and the search for her sexual identity in relationships with both women and men. Eventually, her journey takes her to a place of relative peace and stability where she finds the inner resources and support system to manage her chronic illnesses and live a fulfilling life.

Download or read book A History of Scars written by Laura Lee and published by Atria Books. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From a writer whose work has been called “breathtaking and dazzling” by Roxane Gay, this moving, illuminating, and multifaceted memoir explores, in a series of essays, the emotional scars we carry when dealing with mental and physical illnesses—reminiscent of The Collected Schizophrenias and An Unquiet Mind. In this stunning debut, Laura Lee weaves unforgettable and eye-opening essays on a variety of taboo topics. In “History of Scars” and “Aluminum’s Erosions,” Laura dives head-first into heavier themes revolving around intimacy, sexuality, trauma, mental illness, and the passage of time. In “Poetry of the World,” Laura shifts and addresses the grief she feels by being geographically distant from her mother whom, after being diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s, is relocated to a nursing home in Korea. Through the vivid imagery of mountain climbing, cooking, studying writing, and growing up Korean American, Lee explores the legacy of trauma on a young queer child of immigrants as she reconciles the disparate pieces of existence that make her whole. By tapping into her own personal, emotional, and psychological struggles in these powerful and relatable essays, Lee encourages all of us to not be afraid to face our own hardships and inner truths.

Download or read book THE UNEXPECTED SHAPE written by ESM WEIJUN WANG and published by . This book was released on 2025-08-07 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Incarnadine written by Mary Szybist and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-02-05 with total page 81 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The anticipated second book by the poet Mary Szybist, author of Granted, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award The troubadours knew how to burn themselves through, how to make themselves shrines to their own longing. The spectacular was never behind them.-from "The Troubadours etc." In Incarnadine, Mary Szybist.

Download or read book Customs written by Solmaz Sharif and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2023 CLMP Firecracker Award for Poetry Winner of the 2023 Northern California Book Award for Poetry Finalist for the 2023 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award Finalist for the 2022 L.A. Times Book Prize for Poetry Longlisted for the 2023 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award In Customs, Solmaz Sharif examines what it means to exist in the nowhere of the arrivals terminal, a continual series of checkpoints, officers, searches, and questionings that become a relentless experience of America. With resignation and austerity, these poems trace a pointed indoctrination to the customs of the nation-state and the English language, and the realities they impose upon the imagination, the paces they put us through. While Sharif critiques the culture of performed social skills and poetry itself—its foreclosures, affects, successes—she begins to write her way out to the other side of acceptability and toward freedom. Customs is a brilliant, excoriating new collection by a poet whose unfolding works are among the groundbreaking literature of our time.

Download or read book I Am Not Sidney Poitier written by Percival Everett and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2011-08-02 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I Am Not Sidney Poitier is an irresistible comic novel from the master storyteller Percival Everett, and an irreverent take on race, class, and identity in America I was, in life, to be a gambler, a risk-taker, a swashbuckler, a knight. I accepted, then and there, my place in the world. I was a fighter of windmills. I was a chaser of whales. I was Not Sidney Poitier. Not Sidney Poitier is an amiable young man in an absurd country. The sudden death of his mother orphans him at age eleven, leaving him with an unfortunate name, an uncanny resemblance to the famous actor, and, perhaps more fortunate, a staggering number of shares in the Turner Broadcasting Corporation. Percival Everett's hilarious new novel follows Not Sidney's tumultuous life, as the social hierarchy scrambles to balance his skin color with his fabulous wealth. Maturing under the less-than watchful eye of his adopted foster father, Ted Turner, Not gets arrested in rural Georgia for driving while black, sparks a dinnertable explosion at the home of his manipulative girlfriend, and sleuths a murder case in Smut Eye, Alabama, all while navigating the recurrent communication problem: "What's your name?" a kid would ask. "Not Sidney," I would say. "Okay, then what is it?"

Download or read book Hidden Valley Road written by Robert Kolker and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • ONE OF GQ's TOP 50 BOOKS OF LITERARY JOURNALISM IN THE 21st CENTURY • 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. "Reads like a medical detective journey and sheds light on a topic so many of us face: mental illness." —Oprah Winfrey Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins--aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony--and they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the ten Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen to one family? What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health. Their story offers a shadow history of the science of schizophrenia, from the era of institutionalization, lobotomy, and the schizophrenogenic mother to the search for genetic markers for the disease, always amid profound disagreements about the nature of the illness itself. And unbeknownst to the Galvins, samples of their DNA informed decades of genetic research that continues today, offering paths to treatment, prediction, and even eradication of the disease for future generations. With clarity and compassion, bestselling and award-winning author Robert Kolker uncovers one family's unforgettable legacy of suffering, love, and hope.

Download or read book The Edge of Every Day written by Marin Sardy and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Against the starkly beautiful backdrop of Anchorage, Alaska, where she grew up, Marin Sardy weaves an extraordinarily affecting, fiercely intelligent account of the shapeless thief—the schizophrenia—that kept her mother immersed in a world of private delusion and later also manifested in her brother, ultimately claiming his life. Composed of exquisite, self-contained chapters that take us through three generations of this adventurous, artistic, and often haunted family, The Edge of Every Day draws in topics from neuroscience and evolution to the mythology and art rock to shape its brilliant inquiry into how the mind works. In the process, Sardy casts new light on the treatment of the mentally ill in our society. Through it all runs her blazing compassion and relentless curiosity, as her meditations takes us to the very edge of love and loss—and signal the arrival of an important new literary voice.

Download or read book So Much Blue written by Percival Everett and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2017-06-13 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new high point for a master novelist, an emotionally charged reckoning with art, marriage, and the past Kevin Pace is working on a painting that he won’t allow anyone to see: not his children; not his best friend, Richard; not even his wife, Linda. The painting is a canvas of twelve feet by twenty-one feet (and three inches) that is covered entirely in shades of blue. It may be his masterpiece or it may not; he doesn’t know or, more accurately, doesn’t care. What Kevin does care about are the events of the past. Ten years ago he had an affair with a young watercolorist in Paris. Kevin relates this event with a dispassionate air, even a bit of puzzlement. It’s not clear to him why he had the affair, but he can’t let it go. In the more distant past of the late seventies, Kevin and Richard traveled to El Salvador on the verge of war to retrieve Richard’s drug-dealing brother, who had gone missing without explanation. As the events of the past intersect with the present, Kevin struggles to justify the sacrifices he’s made for his art and the secrets he’s kept from his wife. So Much Blue features Percival Everett at his best, and his deadpan humor and insightful commentary about the artistic life culminate in a brilliantly readable new novel.

Download or read book Transactional Analysis of Schizophrenia written by Zefiro Mellacqua and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-06-04 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Transactional Analysis of Schizophrenia: The Naked Self, Zefiro Mellacqua presents a full assessment of the relevance and value of transactional analysis in understanding, conceptualizing and treating schizophrenia in contemporary clinical settings. Opening with a review of Eric Berne’s ideas, Mellacqua applies theory to the understanding and psychotherapeutic treatment of people suffering from first-episode schizophrenia and to those already living with more long-lasting psychotic levels of self-disturbance. The chapters address a series of crucial methodological themes, including the need for both intensive and extensive analytic sessions; the therapist’s tolerance of uncertainty and not knowing; the informative quality of both therapist’s and patient’s embodiment(s); the emergence of the transference-countertransference relationship; the link between silent transactions and unconscious communication; dream analysis; and the value of regular supervisions. Mellacqua’s approach incorporates meetings with family and caregivers, as well as emphasising multidisciplinary work with patients in a variety of settings, such as in hospitals, outpatient clinics, and psychiatric home treatment. The book is illustrated with engaging clinical case studies throughout, which illuminate the schizophrenic experience and provide examples of how these tools can be used to help patients. Transactional Analysis of Schizophrenia demonstrates how those who suffer from acute schizophrenia, especially those at their very first episode of psychosis, can make an effective recovery and live a satisfying life through the therapeutic application of transactional analysis. It will be essential reading for transactional analysts, psychodynamically oriented psychotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, nurses, social workers, academics and all mental health professionals working with people suffering from schizophrenic psychoses. See the below link for an interview about the book with Gianpiero Petriglieri and series editor William F. Cornell: https://vimeo.com/499800269

Download or read book 99 Poems written by Dana Gioia and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2016-03-01 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: So much of what we live goes on inside— The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches Of unacknowledged love are no less real For having passed unsaid. What we conceal Is always more than what we dare confide. Think of the letters that we write our dead. —from “Unsaid” Dana Gioia has long been celebrated as a poet of sharp intelligence and brooding emotion with an ingenious command of his craft. 99 Poems: New & Selected gathers for the first time work from across his career, including many remarkable new poems. Gioia has not arranged this selection chronologically but instead has organized it by theme in seven sections: Mystery, Place, Remembrance, Imagination, Stories, Songs, and Love. The result is a book that reveals and renews the pleasures, consolations, and sense of wonder that poetry bestows.

Download or read book Dead Languages written by David Shields and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2011-07-05 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Dead Languages by David Shields, Jeremy Zorn's mother tries unsuccessfully to coax him into saying "Philadelphia," and his life becomes framed by his unwieldy attempts at articulation. Through family rituals with his word-obsessed parents and sister, failed first love, an ill-fated run for class president, as the only Jewish boy on an otherwise all-black basketball team, all of the passages of Jeremy's life are marked in some way by his stutter and his wildly off-the-mark attempts at a cure. It is only when he enters college and learns his strong-willed mother is dying that he realizes all languages, when used as hiding places for the heart, are dead ones.