Mental Health Memoir

The best of this year's true crime writing from master true crime authors RJ Parker, Peter Vronsky, JJ Slate, Sylvia Perrini, and Michael Newton, who give us nine new shocking case accounts of serial killers.

Taking us from secure hospital wards to high-security prisons to courtrooms, Dangerous Minds offers compelling and deeply compassionate accounts of 10 people whose lives have been shaped by violence. From the impact of traumatic events in childhood to the evolutionary and cultural influences on the emergence of the social mind, this book is an insider's account of the origins of violence that asks its readers to re-evaluate all that they think they know about the people society deems most dangerous.

What started as a wonderful love story for Mélissa and Scott ended 16 years later with Scott’s dramatic death, leaving Mélissa and her two young children to endure the unimaginable. In her desperation, Mélissa prayed for guidance, and God responded by sending her an army of angels to make her transition from wife to widow more bearable. Since her husband’s passing, Mélissa has felt a strong calling to use her voice to address the stigmas around suicide and mental health.

Ben Short has a successful career in advertising, a flat in a trendy part of London, a flashy motorbike. But after years of suffering with anxiety, he's a wreck. A drastic change is needed. For a time, he finds solace working with a forester, then as an apprentice to a Gypsy woodman, setting up home in a dilapidated wagon with just a rescue dog for company.

Debut memoir chronicling substance abuse, mental illness, and the path to redemption. All of us wonder when a close friend or someone we know dies by suicide, "What were they thinking?" This is an insider look at a woman who attempted to take her own life and failed. Have you heard of the cat with nine lives? This is the woman with ten.

Serial homicide. Stalking. Arson. Gang crime. Who are the people behind these acts of terrible violence? What are their stories? And what is it like to sit opposite them? Dr Gwen Adshead is one of Britain's leading forensic psychiatrists, and she has spent 30 years providing therapy inside secure hospitals and prisons. Whatever her patient's crime, she aims to help them to better know their minds by helping them to articulate their life experience.

Kerry Daynes has worked with some of the most complex and challenging criminals in prisons and secure hospitals as well as the victims of crime. A large part of her day job is spent delving into the psyche of convicted men and women to try to understand what lies behind their actions and how to set them on the path to becoming law-abiding citizens. Welcome to the life of a forensic psychologist. No two days are the same. The people you work with are wildly unpredictable, sometimes frightening and often deeply frustrating.

Finders Keepers is the remarkable true tale of an ordinary man faced with an extraordinary dilemma - what do you do when you find $1.2 million in unmarked bills? - and the fascinating reactions - from complicity to concern to betrayal - of the friends, family, and neighbors to whom he turns. From Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down.

Some serial killers seem surreal, as if it's almost impossible to believe that an individual could do such horrific crimes. The Beast of Birkenshaw, a.k.a. Peter Manuel, was such a man.

We all know girls develop differently to boys during puberty but, shockingly, pro coaches fail to adapt training to their bodies. Girls develop eating disorders, RED-S and amenorrhea; they're also likely to be emotionally and physically abused; and in their careers with sponsors like Nike, they're underpaid and misrepresented. Lauren Fleshman—one of the fastest American women runners—explores scientific and social research while telling her own story in a bold, energetic voice.

Marine Sgt. John Peck survived an IED during the War on Terror that left him with a traumatic brain injury, amnesia, and cost him his marriage. He survived another three years later, one that left him with three and a half limbs missing. He’s one of only two living people to survive the flesh-eating fungus he contracted in recovery at Walter Reed, one that left him as a quadruple amputee. And that’s only the beginning of his story. What followed was a recovery nothing short of miraculous.

Maggie Newcomb had not just one, but three serious mental breakdowns, and in Chocolate Pudding in Heaven, she takes you along on her candid journey from chaos and madness to stability and joy. Diagnosed with bipolar I disorder in her teens, Maggie cleverly reveals the mystery of the human brain as she recounts her last manic episode that began in amazing bliss, and then destroyed the life she had worked so hard to create. After being hospitalized and medicated, she is thrown back into reality, left to pick up the pieces of her broken life.

On August 26, 2015, Emmy Award-winning 24-year-old reporter Alison Parker was murdered on live television, along with her colleague, photojournalist Adam Ward. Their interviewee was also shot but survived. In the wake of his daughter's murder, Andy Parker became a national advocate for commonsense gun safety legislation. The night of the murder, with his emotions still raw, he went on Fox News and vowed to do "whatever it takes" to end gun violence in America.

Paris Fury is Tyson's rock, the wife he thanks for all his success. Both from Traveller families, she married him at 19 and is hands-on mother to their six children, as well as at his side through every fight. Always glamorous, strong, grounded and her own woman. When Tyson's struggles with depression, OCD and alcohol have threatened to overwhelm them, she has held them together and helped to see Tyson through to the greatest boxing victories. With all her warmth, humour and honesty, she tells her story.

Arizona remained a raw, rather uncivilized territory before it became one of the last states to enter the Union. Few towns exemplify this more than Prescott. Within six years of establishment, at least five prostitutes operated in Prescott. As their clientele grew, so did their influence. Mollie Sheppard, Lida Winchell, Gabriell Dollie, and many more women were integral forces on the city that should not be forgotten. Join author Jan MacKell Collins to discover the soiled doves of Prescott's red-light district.

From New York Times best-selling author, Emmy award-winning broadcast journalist, and leading Alzheimer's advocate Meryl Comer comes a profoundly intimate account of her husband's battle with Alzheimer's disease, one of today's most pressing - and least understood - health epidemics.

This workbook is more than just a writing guide—it's a roadmap to self-understanding and personal growth. Turn your memories into memoir, your pain into prose, and your experiences into a testament of resilience. Your story matters—it's time to tell it. In this compassionate and practical guide, Sarah Small, lawyer, author and memoirist, leads you on a profound journey of self-discovery and healing through the art of memoir writing.

Rose Cartwright reveals how the failure of the mental health system to cure her OCD led her to radical action. While she explored her trauma through a series of mind-bending psychedelic trips, Rose started to interrogate our dominant medical paradigm. What if people’s intense distress is not a symptom of illness, but a desperate expression of our need for love and connection? Rose set out on a quest to draw a new map of mental health, interviewing experts in psychiatry and neuroscience along the way: what she discovered will have implications for generations to come.

Abhinav Bindra once shot 100 out of 100 in practice six times in a row and walked out of the range unhappy. He is a perfectionist who once soled his shoes with rubber from Ferrari tyres because he thought it would help. He would wake up at 3:00 a.m. to practise at his range at home if an idea suddenly struck him. It is from such obsession that greatness arrives.

By the time he was twenty-two years old, goaltender Corey Hirsch had realized his childhood dream of playing in the NHL, won an Olympic medal and drunk from the Stanley Cup. While he excelled on the ice, out of the net Hirsch was plagued by persistent dark thoughts and ceaseless anxiety. On days when he could barely get out of bed, he was able to push aside the endless loop of dark thoughts running inside his brain long enough to win a game. But as soon as he got back home, the agonizing cycle started all over again.