Download or read book All Families are Psychotic written by Douglas Coupland and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2002 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the eve of the next Space Shuttle mission, a divided family comes together...Warm, witty and wise, 'All Families Are Psychotic' is Coupland at the very top of his form. In a cheap motel an hour from Cape Canaveral, Janet Drummond takes her medication, and does a rapid tally of the whereabouts of her children. Wade has spent the night in jail; suicidal Bryan is due to arrive at any moment with his vowel-free girlfriend, Shw; and then there is Sarah, 'a bolt of lightning frozen in midflash' - here in Orlando to be the star of Friday's shuttle mission. With Janet's ex-husband and his trophy wife also in town, Janet spends a moment contemplating her family, and where it all went wrong. Or did it? Perfect for fans of Halle Butler, Iain Reid and Rachel Cusk.
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 427 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 Girlfriend in a Coma written by Douglas Coupland and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-06-14 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a snowy Friday night in 1979, just hours after making love for the first time, Richard's girlfriend, high school senior Karen Ann McNeil, falls into a coma. Nine months later she gives birth to their daughter, Megan. As Karen sleeps through the next seventeen years, Richard and their circle of friends reside in an emotional purgatory, passing through a variety of careers—modeling, film special effects, medicine, demolition—before finally reuniting on a conspiracy-driven super-natural television series. But real life grows as surreal as their TV show as Richard and his friends await Karen's reawakening . . . and the subsequent apocalypse.
Download or read book Generation A written by Douglas Coupland and published by Random House Canada. This book was released on 2009-09-01 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Now you young twerps want a new name for your generation? Probably not, you just want jobs, right? Well, the media do us all such tremendous favors when they call you Generation X, right? Two clicks from the very end of the alphabet. I hereby declare you Generation A, as much at the beginning of a series of astonishing triumphs and failures as Adam and Eve were so long ago.” — Kurt Vonnegut, Syracuse University commencement address May 8, 1994 Generation A is a brilliant, timely and very Couplandesque novel about honey bees and the world we may soon live in. Once again, Douglas Coupland captures the spirit of a generation. In the near future bees are extinct—until one autumn when five people are stung in different places around the world. This shared experience unites them in a way they never could have imagined. Generation A mirrors 1991’s Generation X. It explores new ways of looking at the act of reading and storytelling in a digital world. Like much of Coupland's writing, it occupies the perplexing hinterland between optimism about the future and everyday apocalyptic paranoia. Imaginative, inventive and fantastically entertaining, Generation A demonstrates Coupland's unforgettable verve.
Download or read book Life After God written by Douglas Coupland and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-12-25 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: YOU ARE THE FIRST GENERATION RAISED WITHOUT RELIGION What happens if we are raised without religion or beliefs? As we grow older, the beauty and disenchantments of the world temper our souls. We all have spiritual impulses, yet where do these impulses flow in a world of commodities and consumerism? LIFE AFTER GOD is a compellingly innovative collection of stories responding to these themes. Douglas Coupland takes us into worlds we know exist but rarely see, finding rare grace amid our pre-millennium turmoil.
Download or read book Miss Wyoming written by Douglas Coupland and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2001-04-25 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of Generation X and Microserfs, comes the absurd and tender story of a hard-living movie producer and a former child beauty pageant contender who only find each other by losing themselves. Waking up in an LA hospital, John Johnson is amazed that it was the flu and not an overdose of five different drugs mixed with cognac that nearly killed him. As a producer of high-adrenaline action flicks, he's led a decadent and dangerous life, purchasing his way through every conceivable variant of sex. But each variation seems to take him one notch away from a capacity for love, and while movie-making was once a way for him to create worlds of sensation, it now bores him. After his near-death experience, John decides to walk away from his life. Susan Colgate is an unbankable former TV star and child beauty pageant contender. Forced to marry a heavy metal singer in need of a Green Card after her parents squander her sitcom earnings, she becomes the alpha road rat. But when the band's popularity dwindles, the marriage dissolves. Flying back to Los Angeles in Economy, Susan's plane crashes and only she survives. As she walks away from the disaster virtually unscathed, Susan, too, decides to disappear. John and Susan are two souls searching for love across the bizarre, celebrity-obsessed landscape of LA, and are driven, almost fatefully, toward each other. Hilarious, fast-paced and ultimately heart-wrenching, Miss Wyoming is about people who, after throwing off their self-made identities, begin the fearful search for a love that exposes all vulnerabilities.
Download or read book Generation X written by Douglas Coupland and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1991 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three twenty-something young adults, working at low-paying, no-future jobs, tell one another modern tales of love and death.
Download or read book The Gum Thief written by Douglas Coupland and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2011-01-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Douglas Coupland's inventive novel-think Clerks meets Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?-is the story of an extraordinary epistolary relationship between Roger and Bethany, two very different, but strangely connected, "aisles associates" at Staples. Watch as their lives unfold alongside Roger's work-in-progress, the oddly titled Glove Pond. A raucous tale of four academics, two malfunctioning marriages, and one rotten dinner party, Roger's opus is a Cheever-style novella gone horribly wrong. But as key characters migrate into and out of its pages, Glove Pond becomes an anchor of Roger's unsettled-and unsettling-life.Coupland electrifies us on every page of this witty, wise, and unforgettable novel. Love, death, and eternal friendship can all transpire where we least expect them...and even after tragedy seems to have wiped your human slate clean, stories can slowly rebuild you.
Download or read book Hey Nostradamus written by Douglas Coupland and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2009-04-03 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Four people’s lives are set adrift in the wake of a high school shooting—three can’t escape the loneliness that plagues them, while a fourth races for oblivion, wondering what happened to God. Bristling with Douglas Coupland’s hallmark humor and cultural acuity, Hey Nostradamus! achieves new heights of poignancy and literary accomplishment.
Download or read book Because I Come from a Crazy Family written by Edward M. Hallowell and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of the classic book on ADD, Driven to Distraction, a memoir of the strange upbringing that shaped Dr. Edward M. Hallowell's celebrated career. When Edward M. Hallowell was eleven, a voice out of nowhere told him he should become a psychiatrist. A mental health professional of the time would have called this psychosis. But young Edward (Ned) took it in stride, despite not quite knowing what "psychiatrist" meant. With a psychotic father, alcoholic mother, abusive stepfather, and two so-called learning disabilities of his own, Ned was accustomed to unpredictable behavior from those around him, and to a mind he felt he couldn't always control. The voice turned out to be right. Now, decades later, Hallowell is a leading expert on attention disorders and the author of twenty books, including Driven to Distraction, the work that introduced ADD to the world. In Because I Come from a Crazy Family, he tells the often strange story of a childhood marked by what he calls the "WASP triad" of alcoholism, mental illness, and politeness, and explores the wild wish, surging beneath his incredible ambition, that he could have saved his own family of drunk, crazy, and well-intentioned eccentrics, and himself. Because I Come from a Crazy Family is an affecting, at times harrowing, ultimately moving memoir about crazy families and where they can lead, about being called to the mental health profession, and about the unending joys and challenges that come with helping people celebrate who they are. A portion of the author's proceeds of this book will go to NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness).
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 JPod written by Douglas Coupland and published by Vintage Canada. This book was released on 2011-03-18 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lethal joyride into today’s new breed of technogeeks, Coupland’s JPod updates Microserfs for the age of Google. Ethan Jarlewski and five co-workers whose names start with J are bureaucratically marooned in jPod, a no-escape architectural limbo on the fringes of a massive Vancouver game design company. The six workers daily confront the forces that define our era: global piracy, boneheaded marketing staff, people smuggling, the rise of China, marijuana grow-ops, Jeff Probst and the ashes of the 1990s financial tech dream. jPod’s universe is amoral and shameless. The characters are products of their era even as they’re creating it. Everybody in Ethan’s life inhabits a moral grey zone. Nobody is exempt, not even his seemingly straitlaced parents or Coupland himself, as readers will see. Full of word games, visual jokes and sideways jabs, this book throws a sharp, pointed lawn dart into the heart of contemporary life. JPod is Douglas Coupland at the top of his game.
Download or read book Eleanor Rigby written by Douglas Coupland and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2010-07-29 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the hugely acclaimed bestseller Hey Nostradamus! comes a major novel from Douglas Coupland: the wonderfully warm, funny, life-affirming story of Liz Dunn, a woman who has spent her whole life alone and lonely – until now... This is a brilliant work of commercial literary fiction from an author who just gets better and better.
Download or read book Staying Well After Psychosis written by Andrew Gumley and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2006-02-03 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Staying Well After Psychosis is extremely readable, based on solid research evidence and packed full of clinical insights and strategies that will satisfy any clinician seeking innovative approaches to the promotion of recovery from psychosis." —Anthony P. Morrison, Professor of Clinical Psychology, University of Manchester, UK Over the past decade our understanding of the experience of psychosis has changed dramatically. As part of this change, a range of psychological models of psychosis and associated interventions have developed. Staying Well After Psychosis presents an individually based psychological intervention targeting emotional recovery and relapse prevention. This approach considers the cognitive, interpersonal and developmental aspects involved in recovery and vulnerability to the recurrence of psychosis. Andrew Gumley and Matthias Schwannauer provide a framework for recovery and staying well that focuses on emotional and interpersonal adaptation to psychosis. This practical manual covers, in detail, all aspects of the therapeutic process of Cognitive Interpersonal Therapy, including: Taking a developmental perspective on help seeking and affect regulation. Supporting self-reorganisation and adaptation after acute psychosis. Understanding and treating traumatic reactions to psychosis. Working with humiliation, entrapment, loss and fear of recurrence appraisals during recovery. Working with cognitive interpersonal schemata. Developing coping in an interpersonal context. Clinical psychologists, psychiatrists and mental health professionals will find this innovative treatment manual to be a valuable resource in their work with adults and adolescents. This book will also be of interest to lecturers and students of clinical psychology and mental health.
Download or read book Shampoo Planet written by Douglas Coupland and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1993-05 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite their differing values, Tyler Johnson, an ambitious hotel management student, tries to console his mother, a former hippie, when Dan, his land-developer stepfather, decides to get a divorce.
Download or read book Families Coping with Mental Illness written by Yuko Kawanishi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-12-11 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When someone develops a mental illness, the impact on the family is often profound. The most common treatment processes, however, focus on the patient while the loved ones are relegated to subordinate roles and sometimes even viewed as barriers to effective recovery. Families Coping with Mental Illness approaches these issues from the family's perspective, studying how they react to initial diagnosis, adjust to new circumstances, and cope with the situation. Through her own original research in the United States and Japan, Kawanishi presents a cross-cultural experience of mental illness that examine both psychological and sociological issues, making this book suitable to all international fields engaging with diversity and mental health. Including first-hand accounts along with analysis and discussion, Kawanishi gives voice to family members and adeptly identifies universal themes of resilience, adaptability, and strength of the family unit. This innovative text offers a unique viewpoint that will appeal to a wide audience of professionals and non-professionals from a variety of backgrounds.
Download or read book Polaroids from the Dead written by Douglas Coupland and published by HarperPerennial Canada. This book was released on 2003 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Douglas Coupland takes his sparkling literary talent in a new direction with this crackling collection of takes on life and death in North America -- from his sweeping portrait of Grateful Dead culture to the deaths of Kurt Cobain, Marilyn Monroe and the middle class. For years, Coupland's razor-sharp insights into what it means to be human in an age of technology have garnered the highest praise from fans and critics alike.At last, Coupland has assembled a wide variety of stories and personal "postcards" about pivotal people and places that have defined our modern lives.Polaroids from the Dead is a skillful combination of stories, fact and fiction -- keen outtakes on life in the late 20th century, exploring the recent past and a society obsessed with celebrity, crime and death.Princess Diana, Nicole Brown Simpson and Madonna are but some of the people scrutinized.
