Download or read book Mental Hell How My Mother s Schizophrenia Became My Gift written by Nancy Thomason and published by . This book was released on 2018-05-03 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nancy Thomason lived with a mother who was paranoid schizophrenic, a diagnosis known only after she was institutionalized. Until then, no one talked about it. Not the police who visited often. Not Nancy's friends who were busy being teenagers. Not her school teachers and counselors, who wondered what was going on. Not the social workers who found a place for her and her brother to live. No one had word for what her mother left behind. Except hell.

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 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 Caught in the Web of My Mother s Psychosis written by Marilyn T. Evans and published by Page Publishing Inc. This book was released on 2022-07-19 with total page 57 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Being mentally ill is a lifelong battle of ups and downs, and not a lot of people understand or take the time to care to understand the mentally ill. Everyone are in a class of their own in the world which makes it extremely hard for the mentally ill and non-mentally ill to connect with one another. There are so many rules and regulations to follow for mental patients and their friends and family to know and live by. Finding a balance for such can be very hard.

Download or read book Primary Gift written by Kelly F. Holland and published by Balboa Press. This book was released on 2014-05-15 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early in my life, I faced great challenges. I could not be a child like my siblings or my classmates. My journey was different. In my school, I learned about schizophrenia and physical violence. My teacher was very powerful. As an adolescent I lost my way. I became a ward of the court and completed my high school education while living in a state group home. In 1989, at age twenty-six, I met an exemplary professional who began to show me the way. For the next twenty years and beyond, I learned lessons of discipline, love, and respect for self and others. Soon, my lifes success began to unfold. At age twenty-six, I received my lifes primary gift. In 1999, I became on fire for my life, because of the excellence that I had witnessed in another person. I began to dream of talking to the world about the excellence that lives within each one of us. I relocated my life to the desert Southwest. It was there that I began to hear my hearts song and awaken to the excellence of my lifes journey. It was there that I discovered the wisdom of my lifes teachings. I believe that no matter what circumstances you may find yourself in, excellence is present. And, no matter how desolate you may feel, when you find the fire, the inspiration, and the music of your heart there isnt anything that can keep you from living your lifes dreams. ???

Download or read book A Room with a Darker View written by Claire Phillips and published by Doppelhouse Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I am going blind. I am going blind," my mother would proclaim whenever I would call her in the psychiatric hospital, from almost three thousand miles away in Los Angeles. "By tomorrow," my mother would shout into the phone, "I will be blind." For years she had coped on her own until her doctor reduced her Haldol in hopes of decreasing harmful neurological side effects. The results were cataclysmic. This would be one of many relapses after receiving a diagnosis for paranoid schizophrenia in her mid-forties, after a ten-year prolonged psychosis during which my mother worked as criminal public defense counsel on behalf of some of New York and New Jersey's most disadvantaged residents. A Room with a Darker View is an unflinching, feminist work that chronicles the author's troubled relationship with her mother, an Oxford-trained lawyer, whose severe illness -- marked by manic bouts of senseless laughter, persistent delusions, and florid hallucinations -- went unrecognized for decades by both her husband, a world-class British astrophysicist, and her father, a Jewish-Zimbabwean doctor knighted by Pope Paul VI. Told in fragments, flashbacks, and chronicling the most extreme but unfortunately common aspects of schizophrenia, this elegantly written memoir is a reflection on illness, shame, and the generation gaps that have defined mother-daughter relationships amid the evolution of feminism in the 20th century. Like Porochista Khakpour's lauded memoir, Sick (2018), A Room with a Darker View is not a linear tale of redemption or restitution. Rather, it challenges conceptions about mental illness, difficulties caring for an aging parent with a chronic disease, and how we frame contributions by outliers to society, while offering a scathing look at a broken medical system, the unwillingness of an elite educated family to reckon with its secrets, and finally, the universally-understood difficulty of caring for an aging parent with a chronic illness. Unsurprisingly, feminists have been at the forefront of writing illness narratives, from Virginia Woolf to Audre Lord and Susan Sontag. My family's inability to accommodate my mother's illness, the perniciousness of her particular subtype of schizophrenia, paranoia, and the story of women's fight for gender equality in both the workplace and at home are part of this chronicle. In 500-word vignettes A Room with a Darker View retrospectively examines the trauma of undiagnosed mental illness besieging a mother-daughter relationship from toddlerhood through college and into the author's adult life as a writer and lecturer. Of particular note, the author documents her mother's determination in trying to find a place for herself in the male dominated field of law in the 1970s, and her equal determination to recover some semblance of a life after a difficult diagnosis, as she becomes heavily medicated and impoverished by divorce. Only with her mother's final relapse at 73 did the author begin to tell this story, first in Black Clock, an essay for which she received a Pushcart nomination and notable mention in The Best American Essays 2015.

Download or read book The Voice of Spirit written by Judy O’Brien and published by Balboa Press. This book was released on 2016-05-16 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Voice of Spirit: A Mediums Story introduces a clinical nurse specialist whose vocation to become a medium led her to devote her full attention to the messages that spirits desire to share with the people they have left behind in this world. Judy OBrien, whose work has given rise to her business, Angels Amongst Us, speaks with a conversational and honest voice in the pages of this book that blends the genres and intentions of a memoir, a spiritual reflection, and a guide. As the author tells her lifes story, she notes, I can communicate with loved ones who have crossed over. I have been aware of this abilityor giftsince I was five, but it wasnt until many years later, that I wanted to learn more about spirituality and understand the messages I was receiving because I had always thought they were just my intuition. Readers following her on the journey narrated in The Voice of Spirit will traverse the same path of deepening insight and recognize the blessings that come from listening to the messages that arise and contemplating their sources and meanings. In The Voice of Spirit: A Mediums Story, Judy OBrien desires to validate the existence of spirits for all whom those same spirits have left behind. As you read her story, you can find hope and peace and appreciate the love that transcends the boundaries of the physical world and that beckons you toward the spiritual world in which eternal love never dies.

Download or read book The Light in His Soul written by Rebecca Schaper and published by Grey Hawk Productions Incorporated. This book was released on 2018-04-28 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Call Richmond, Jr. went missing. Twenty years later he showed up on a family member's doorstep. He was homeless, broken, and suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. For the next fourteen years, his sister Rebecca took on the struggle to restore him as they faced the dark traumas and painful memories of their past. The Light in His Soul: Lessons from My Brother's Schizophrenia is her intimate memoir of helping Call as she learns that his extraordinary gifts are helping heal her and her family. Both Call and Rebecca bring light to the dark shadows of their past.The book recaps the story of the award-winning documentary film A Sister's Call, supplemented by Rebecca's insights about the soul contract she has with her brother.

Download or read book The Gift of Depression written by John F. Brown and published by The Fun Foundation. This book was released on 2001 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book series is intended to enlighten the world about people living with depression. Its main objective is to remove the public stigma keeping tens of millions of sufferers from seeking treatment for this illness. We believe if people read about what actually has happened in the lives of those with a mental illness, it will dispel their fears and ultimately end the stigma. After all, most of our reactions to life are nothing more than learned behaviors and habits. We hope, by reading this book and the series to follow, you will change your attitudes and interactions toward the mentally ill. Its that simple.

Download or read book I Love Jesus But I Want to Die written by Sarah J. Robinson and published by WaterBrook. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A compassionate, shame-free guide for your darkest days “A one-of-a-kind book . . . to read for yourself or give to a struggling friend or loved one without the fear that depression and suicidal thoughts will be minimized, medicalized or over-spiritualized.”—Kay Warren, cofounder of Saddleback Church What happens when loving Jesus doesn’t cure you of depression, anxiety, or suicidal thoughts? You might be crushed by shame over your mental illness, only to be told by well-meaning Christians to “choose joy” and “pray more.” So you beg God to take away the pain, but nothing eases the ache inside. As darkness lingers and color drains from your world, you’re left wondering if God has abandoned you. You just want a way out. But there’s hope. In I Love Jesus, But I Want to Die, Sarah J. Robinson offers a healthy, practical, and shame-free guide for Christians struggling with mental illness. With unflinching honesty, Sarah shares her story of battling depression and fighting to stay alive despite toxic theology that made her afraid to seek help outside the church. Pairing her own story with scriptural insights, mental health research, and simple practices, Sarah helps you reconnect with the God who is present in our deepest anguish and discover that you are worth everything it takes to get better. Beautifully written and full of hard-won wisdom, I Love Jesus, But I Want to Die offers a path toward a rich, hope-filled life in Christ, even when healing doesn’t look like what you expect.

Download or read book The Works of a Schizophrenic written by Christine Walter and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2014-06-02 with total page 55 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book includes art work, a play, poetry and my story. It is about my journey of healing through writing. Overcoming partner abuse, mental illness and being institutionalized. My hope is that anyone who has been abused or diagnosed with a mental illness will be able to relate to my book. This book is for everyone. I hope to decrease the stigmatization of those diagnosed with an illness and illustrate that labels don't stop people from having successful lives.

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 Reflections on the Meaning of Mental Integrity written by Marcia A. Murphy and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2021-12-07 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How is mental integrity (the state of being complete, whole) achieved in light of serious mental illness? The author’s intent is that this work will be a source of insight and healing for many and that it will equip the church, conjoined with the medical/scientific field of psychiatry, to do a better job of enabling people living with mental illness to access the resources they need for becoming whole. The author shares some of her personal story of experience with serious mental illness, i.e., its genesis and her subsequent recovery process, which included involvement in a Christian community and her ministry work as an advocate for the mentally ill.

Download or read book Motherhood Mental Illness and Recovery written by Nikole Benders-Hadi and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-08-01 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the importance of regaining social roles during recovery from mental illness, the intersection between motherhood and serious mental illness is often overlooked. This book aims to rectify that neglect. A series of introductory chapters describing current research and services available to mothers with serious mental illness are followed by personal accounts of clients reflecting on their parenting experiences. One goal of the book is to provide clinicians with information that they can use to help patients struggling with questions and barriers in their attempts to parent. The inclusion of personal accounts of mothers on issues such as stigma, fears and discrimination in the context of parenting with a mental illness is intended to promote the message of mental illness recovery to a larger audience as well. Finally, it is hoped that this handbook will help inspire more research on mothers with mental illness and the creation of more services tailored to their needs.

Download or read book Worst Thing Best Thing written by Cheryl Roma Yarek and published by Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.. This book was released on 2019-02-11 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This story is about possibility. It describes the journey of a young woman diagnosed with a mental health issue, given a monthly disability benefit, and told she will never work again. Despite this, she eventually has a twenty-seven-year full-time career in mental health. She is supported by a phenomenal psychiatrist who often backs her client's stubborn but convincing moves. As the title indicates, this is all about turning bad to good or negative to positive, and it features a long-term career""empowering disabled individuals""in the way some people had empowered her. For example, this book exists because an EAP counselor insisted she write it. (Yes, sometimes Cheryl really does do what she is told!) This is a story for all education departments dealing with human psychology, sociology, or disability, and it may very well generate a discussion well beyond Canadian borders.

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 Breaking the Silence written by Stephen P. Hinshaw and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-01-08 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Living with Mental Illness, mental health professionals and scientists, ranging from newly trained individuals to seasoned clinicians and researchers, tell their own and their families' stories of mental disorder, providing an unprecedented level of honesty and disclosure. This volume will be indispensable reading for those in the mental health professions, trainees across many related fields, family members, persons contending with mental illness, and all those who wish to know more about the effects of mental illness on our society.