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 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 My Schizophrenic Life written by Sandra Yuen MacKay and published by Bridgeross Communications. This book was released on 2010 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early in her life, Sandra started to exhibit the symptons of paranoid schizophrenia which came as a surprise to her unsuspecting family. Her book chronicles her struggles, hospitalisations, encounters with professionals, return to school, eventual marriage and success as an artist, writer, and advocate.
Download or read book A Schizophrenic Tapped Skipped written by Writenowbooks Llc and published by Writenowbooks LLC. This book was released on 2022-01-16 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Faced with a severely schizophrenic daughter, homeless with no hope, and a heroin-addicted daughter clinging to life living in her car. A mother searches an infant boy's eyes for the answers. How can God's hand pull them through all this darkness? How will a mother find a different route? This is a journey through unmerciful mental madness and the torment of the people who desperately try to find help. Mentally ill are SKIPPED by society. Drug addiction is relentless. One day at a time, God's glorious path becomes clear.
Download or read book My Mother s Keeper written by Tara E. Holley and published by Harper Perennial. This book was released on 1998-07-01 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Separated from her mother at an early age, Tara Elgin Holley became her mother's legal guardian at age 16 and set about trying to rescue the blonde fairy princess she remembered from the shambling street person her mother had become. An inspiring story of one woman's struggle to struggle through the pain to reach a better understanding of her mother, herself and a devastating mental illness.
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 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 Memoir of a Schizophrenic written by Karl Lorenz Willett and published by . This book was released on 2021-10-15 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Memoir of a Schizophrenic is a work of autobiographical non-fiction that delivers a powerful, moving story about the author's struggles with the devastating psychological condition of schizophrenia. It goes some way toward removing the stigma attached to mental illnesses. The author lays bare a heartbreaking journey that speaks, in its most raw form, directly to those he loves. The heart of the narrative lies in the secret strength of family, and those who take the time to read it will find this true story highly emotive and deeply touching. The story explores the darkness of a soul without hiding its light; a tale so bold and brutally honest, it is spellbinding and filled with grit. Readers will find it both encouraging and inspiring, as it is a story that communicates love, faith, hope and the message that despite annoying devilry and its mischievous energy, we can always triumph over negative thoughts.
Download or read book Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl written by Marguerite Sechehaye and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1994-11-01 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the astonishing memoir of a young woman called only “Renee,” whose descent into schizophrenia began at the age of five. Written with a diamond-sharp precision that lends it an eerie power, it tells the story of Renee’s long sojourn in what she calls “The Land of Enlightenment" or “The Country of Tibet” and of her gradual and painstaking return to “wonderful reality.” Renee moves in and out of hospitals, sometimes able to eat only tea and spinach, or apples and spinach, because “‘The System forbade anything else.” She regresses to a state resembling infancy, and she experiences intense despair, although she always describes her experiences with a pitiless and remarkable calm, as though she has observed herself from a great distance. And all the while she is sustained by the attention and understanding of her analyst, Marguerite Sechehaye, who has contributed an illuminating Afterword to her story. This harrowing and unforgettable work is a classic in the literature of mental illness. With a foreword by Frank Conroy.
Download or read book Ben Behind His Voices written by Randye Kaye and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2011-10-16 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When readers first meet Ben, he is a sweet, intelligent, seemingly well-adjusted youngster. Fast forward to his teenage years, though, and Ben's life has spun out of control. Ben is swept along by an illness over which he has no control—one that results in runaway episodes, periods of homelessness, seven psychotic breaks, seven hospitalizations, and finally a diagnosis and treatment plan that begins to work. Schizophrenia strikes an estimated one in a hundred people worldwide by some estimates, and yet understanding of the illness is lacking. Through Ben's experiences, and those of his mother and sister, who supported Ben through every stage of his illness and treatment, readers gain a better understanding of schizophrenia, as well as mental illness in general, and the way it affects individuals and families. Here, Kaye encourages families to stay together and find strength while accepting the reality of a loved one's illness; she illustrates, through her experiences as Ben's mother, the delicate balance between letting go and staying involved. She honors the courage of anyone who suffers with mental illness and is trying to improve his life and participate in his own recovery. Ben Behind His Voices also reminds professionals in the psychiatric field that every patient who comes through their doors has a life, one that he has lost through no fault of his own. It shows what goes right when professionals treat the family as part of the recovery process and help them find support, education, and acceptance. And it reminds readers that those who suffer from mental illness, and their families, deserve respect, concern, and dignity.
Download or read book Henry s Demons written by Patrick Cockburn and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-02-14 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Narrated by both Henry Cockburn and his father Patrick, this is the extraordinary story of the eight years since Henry's descent into schizophrenia- years he has spent almost entirely in hospitals- and his family's struggle to help him recover.
Download or read book Tastes Like War written by Grace M. Cho and published by Feminist Press at CUNY. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Nonfiction Winner of the 2022 Asian/Pacific American Award in Literature A TIME and NPR Best Book of the Year in 2021 This evocative memoir of food and family history is "somehow both mouthwatering and heartbreaking... [and] a potent personal history" (Shelf Awareness). Grace M. Cho grew up as the daughter of a white American merchant marine and the Korean bar hostess he met abroad. They were one of few immigrants in a xenophobic small town during the Cold War, where identity was politicized by everyday details—language, cultural references, memories, and food. When Grace was fifteen, her dynamic mother experienced the onset of schizophrenia, a condition that would continue and evolve for the rest of her life. Part food memoir, part sociological investigation, Tastes Like War is a hybrid text about a daughter’s search through intimate and global history for the roots of her mother’s schizophrenia. In her mother’s final years, Grace learned to cook dishes from her parent’s childhood in order to invite the past into the present, and to hold space for her mother’s multiple voices at the table. And through careful listening over these shared meals, Grace discovered not only the things that broke the brilliant, complicated woman who raised her—but also the things that kept her alive. “An exquisite commemoration and a potent reclamation.” —Booklist (starred review) “A wrenching, powerful account of the long-term effects of the immigrant experience.” —Kirkus Reviews
Download or read book Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl written by Marguerite Sechehaye and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2018-12-01 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Marguerite Sechehaye, a Swiss psychotherapist, followed the work of Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget closely, believing there was a link between psychosis and trauma experienced as a child. One of her most notable cases was undertaken with a psychotic patient referred to as “Renée”, a pseudonym used for Louisa Düss, whom she and her husband Albert Sechehaye eventually adopted. Over the course of their work together, Dr. Sechehaye took the unique approach of chronicling “Renee’s” journal entries and personal reflections in tandem with her own clinical commentary. The approach significantly influenced mental illness research by introducing an antipsychiatry framework that positioned the patient’s experiences as a valid means of establishing their case histories. As a result of this work, Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl: Reality Lost and Regained was first published in 1951, highlighting the most memorable aspects of the disease. The book remarkably reveals to the “normal” mind the emotional shadings, perceptions, confusions, and tortures of a mind at the brink of dissolution. It is at once a harrowing experience and a magnificently moving testimonial to the capacity of a human being to survive and triumph.
Download or read book Everything Is Fine written by Vince Granata and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-02-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Granata was a thousand miles from home when he received shocking news that his younger brother, Tim, propelled by unchecked schizophrenia, had killed their mother in their childhood home. Devastated by the grief of losing his mother, Granata was also consumed by the act itself, so incomprehensible that it overshadows every happy memory of life growing up in a seemingly idyllic middle-class family. He decides to examine the disease that irrecoverably changed his family's destiny and piece together his brother's story. In the painstaking process of recovering the image of his remarkable mother and salvaging the love for his brother as Tim faces trial for their mother's murder, Granata provides a powerful and reaffirming portrait of loss and forgiveness. -- adapted from jacket
Download or read book Stalking Irish Madness written by Patrick Tracey and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2008-08-26 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this powerful, sometimes harrowing, deeply felt story, Patrick Tracey journeys to Ireland to track the origin and solve the mystery of his Irish-American family's multigenerational struggle with schizophrenia. For most Irish Americans, a trip to Ireland is often an occasion to revisit their family's roots. But for Patrick Tracey, the lure of his ancestral home is a much more powerful need: part pilgrimage, part investigation to confront the genealogical mystery of schizophrenia–a disease that had claimed a great-great-great-grandmother, a grandmother, an uncle, and, most recently, two sisters. As long as Tracey could remember, schizophrenia ran on his mother's side, seldom spoken of outright but impossible to ignore. Devastated by the emotional toll the disease had already taken on his family, terrified of passing it on to any children he might have, and inspired by the recent discovery of the first genetic link to schizophrenia, Tracey followed his genealogical trail from Boston to Ireland's county Roscommon, home of his oldest-known schizophrenic ancestor. In a renovated camper, Tracey crossed the Emerald Isle to investigate the country that, until the 1960s, had the world's highest rate of institutionalization for mental illness, following clues and separating fact from fiction in the legendary relationship the Irish have had with madness. Tracey's path leads from fairy mounds and ancient caverns still shrouded in superstition to old pubs whose colorful inhabitants are a treasure trove of local lore. He visits the massive and grim asylum where his famine starved ancestors may have lived. And he interviews the Irish research team that first cracked the schizophrenic code to learn how much–and how little–we know about this often misunderstood disease. Filled with history, science, and lore, Stalking Irish Madness is an unforgettable chronicle of one man's attempt to make sense of his family's past and to find hope for the future of schizophrenic patients. From the Hardcover edition.
Download or read book Memoir of a Schizophrenic written by Karl Willett and published by Chipmunka Publishing. This book was released on 2016-07 with total page 714 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Description This is the extraordinary story of Karl's life, an ordinary man with a controlled mental health problem. At the centre of his heart is the love and care for his family and for other people. No matter which direction his circumstances takes him he is usually handicapped on a side or sides and get frustrated, terribly worried, anxious and despairing. He realized he had come far in survival of his marriage and in a jumble of actions and feelings many things happened simultaneously and Karl recorded them. The irregularity of Karl's life stories suggests there is someone designing destinies but through patience and understanding he drawn much more on his own strength. Karl had catalogued many actions, sensation, thoughts and feelings that had crowded into the kaleidoscope of time from the year he was born1956 to the present 2016. About the Author Karl Willett was born in the year 1956 and is an expert by lived experience of schizophrenia. Karl's expertized by experience has explored a part of himself that digs deep into the part of his soul which inspires and he conveys in his book 'The Memoirs of a Schizophrenic' the wrestle with spiritual thoughts, darkness and light, reason, chaos and family life. Karl has a deep appreciation for life and love people and carries a donor card. Karl's purpose and passion lies in helping someone to live a more normal life and prolong their existence on earth by giving his organ in an act of love that extended further than family and friends. It's his last ultimate gift of giving. Until recently, Karl served as Trustee for the user led network for mental health and is the co-ordinator for the Neighbour hood watch scheme in the place where he lives. Karl is none judgemental and carries no prejudice attitudes because he is fused with the ability to love all people and have respect for others and respect for himself. Biography
Download or read book Losing Dad Paranoid Schizophrenia written by Amanda LaPera and published by . This book was released on 2024-01-24 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No drugs. No alcohol. So, how does a fifty-three-year-old develop schizophrenia? That's the question puzzling Joseph's family when his mind descends into madness, filled with grandiose delusions and paranoia. He traverses several continents as a self-proclaimed prophet of God. Then he disappears.His wife and three kids race to find answers before he slips away forever. Their biggest fear-he will die a faceless stranger on the streets. Alone. Winner of a Benjamin Franklin Silver Award in the category of psychology, Losing Dad, Paranoid Schizophrenia: A Family's Search for Hope is a compelling true story told through multiple perspectives-the children, spouse, and patient; it offers a rare glimpse into a world that will either feel hauntingly familiar or shocking. The Foreword written by Xavier Amador, Ph.D., Founder, LEAP Institute, Author, I am Not Sick, I Don't Need Help! (Vida Press 2012) explains the neurological condition of anosognosia; provided supplemental materials include a list of resources; discussion of mental health laws; exclusive author and family member interviews; as well as reading guide questions useful for book clubs, classroom discussion, case study, or professional education for those in medical, mental health, law enforcement, political, and legal fields to better understand the societal and psychological impacts of mental illness, both as experienced by family caregivers and the community. Ideal for Advanced Topics in Psychopathology books portraying lived experiences. Severe mental illness affects one in seventeen and can develop inside any mind at any time. It impacts the entire family.
