Mental Health Memoir

In Episodes, lifelong best friends Kat and Mara take listeners on an unfiltered journey through friendship, mental illness, and survival. Kat, a successful professional, is preparing for marriage and motherhood. On her fourth round of IVF, it happened—a frantic call to Mara. Mara comes over to find Kat, her friend of 25 years—the one who'd always been levelheaded, hilarious, and over-the-top thoughtful—trying to jump through a window.

Ten years after the school massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, school shootings are a new and alarming epidemic. While sociologists have attributed the trigger of violence to peer pressure, such as bullying and social isolation, prominent psychologist Peter Langman, argues here that psychological causes are responsible. Drawing on 20 years of clinical experience, Langman offers surprising reasons for why some teens become violent. Langman divides shooters into three categories, and he discusses the role of personality, trauma, and psychosis among school shooters.

Enveloped in the dark inner kingdom of her schizophrenia, 16-year-old Deborah is haunted by private tormentors that isolate her from the outside world. With the reluctant and fearful consent of her parents, she enters a mental hospital where she will spend the next three years battling to regain her sanity with the help of a gifted psychiatrist. As Deborah struggles toward the possibility of the "normal" life she and her family hope for, the listener is inexorably drawn into her private suffering and deep determination to confront her demons.

Laura Jane Grace doesn’t defy rock ‘n’ roll. She defines it. In an inspiring examination of identity and creativity, the founder and frontwoman of notorious punk band Against Me! recounts the story of her extraordinary life, her rise to fame, and the painful but powerful moments that have led her to where she is now. Black Me Out invites listeners to not only hear Grace’s complicated journey through gender dysphoria, addiction, mental health, and artistic integrity, but recognize the universal pursuit of our authentic selves. Track the common journey with a modern icon.

Discover why women are so often unhappy with their appearance - and how they can learn to love themselves. When women are told that what is important about us is how we look, it becomes increasingly difficult for us to feel comfortable with our appearance and how we feel about our bodies. We are told, over and over - if we just lost weight, fit into those old jeans, or into a new smaller pair - we will be happier and feel better about ourselves.

Dr. Jamison is one of the foremost authorities on manic-depressive (bipolar) illness; she has also experienced it firsthand. For even while she was pursuing her career in academic medicine, Jamison found herself succumbing to the same exhilarating highs and catastrophic depressions that afflicted many of her patients, as her disorder launched her into ruinous spending sprees, episodes of violence, and an attempted suicide.

A work of great personal courage and a literary tour de force, this bestseller is Styron's true account of his experience of crippling depression. Styron is perhaps the first writer to convey the full terror of depression's psychic landscape, as well as the illuminating path to recovery.

Holly Hill (pseudonym) gave up her job at the behest of her wealthy boyfriend - and then found herself dumped and penniless. After spending six weeks in bed pining for her lost love, she was encouraged by a friend to be "open-minded" about her career choices - and ended up placing an online ad for a sugar daddy. She received an almost overwhelming response from all sorts of men, but most of them were married men whose wives had lost interest in sex. As Holly interviewed the men and settled on a candidate, she decided to record what happened next.

At the heart of countless crimes lie the mysteries of the human mind. In this eye-opening book, Dr. Cheryl Paradis draws back the curtain on the fascinating world of forensic psychology, and revisits the most notorious and puzzling cases she has handled in her multifaceted career. Her riveting, sometimes shocking stories reveal the crucial and often surprising role forensic psychology plays in the pursuit of justice - in which the accused may truly believe their own bizarre lies, creating a world that pushes them into committing horrific, violent crimes.

Scottish comedian Fern Brady was told she couldn't be autistic because she'd had loads of boyfriends and is good at eye contact. In this frank and surreal memoir, she delivers a sharp and often hilarious portrait of neurodivergence and living unmasked.

Seventeen-year-old Elena is vanishing. Every day means renewed determination, so every day means fewer calories. This is the story of a girl whose armor against anxiety becomes artillery against herself as she battles on both sides of a lose-lose war in a struggle with anorexia.

A prize-winning journalist with a background in neuroscience, Helen Thomson spent years tracking down people who live with the world's most extraordinary neurological disorders - like a man who tried to break his back because his legs no longer felt like his own, and another who believed that he was dead for nine years. Not content to simply read about these cases on paper, Thomson reached out to 10 people with these afflictions, and they agreed to tell her their stories.

Anna's always had too many feelings. Or not enough feelings—she's never been quite sure. Debilitating panic. Extraordinary melancholy. Paranoia. Ambivalence. Fear. Despair. From anxious child to terrified parent, mental illness has been a constant. But between therapists' rooms and emergency departments, there's been a feeling even harder to explain … optimism. In this sharp-eyed and illuminating memoir, award-winning writer Anna Spargo-Ryan pieces together the relationships between time, mental illness, and our brain as the keeper of our stories.

In the tradition of Ann Rule and the international best seller Women Who Kill comes the first book that chronicles the psychological profiles of spouses who kill, from Scott Peterson to Rabbi Fred Neulander, told by a renowned psychotherapist who specializes in spousal behavior and the criminal mind.

Step into the fractured mind of Kurt Cobain in Kurt Cobain: Drowning in My Words, a raw, unfiltered imagined memoir told entirely in his voice. Through dark humor, self-loathing wit, and heart-wrenching honesty, this book traces the iconic Nirvana frontman’s rise from a chaotic childhood in Aberdeen, Washington, to the global stages he grew to despise. Told in first-person with searing vulnerability and a punchline always lurking under the grief, Cobain revisits the moments that defined—and destroyed—him: from stealing his first guitar, to recording Bleach on fumes and cigarettes, to ...

With four young daughters and a miserably failed marriage, Debra Gwartney moves halfway across the country, to Eugene, Oregon, for a new job and what she hopes will be a new life for herself and her daughters. The two oldest, Amanda, 14, and Stephanie, 13, have a symbiotic relationship so intense they barely know where one begins and the other leaves off. They

With those chilling words, the author’s world was shattered. What began as an unimaginable tragedy unraveled into a devastating story of mental illness, family bonds, and the fragile line between love and fear. In this gripping true crime memoir, the author takes listeners inside the courtroom where shocking revelations exposed the depth of his sister’s mental unraveling. Through raw and unflinching honesty, he reflects on the haunting events that led to that fateful day and the lasting impact on those left behind.

Revisiting Dr. Michael Stone's groundbreaking 22-level Gradations of Evil Scale, a hierarchy of evil behavior first introduced in the book The Anatomy of Evil, Stone and Dr. Gary Brucato, a fellow violence and serious psychopathology expert, here provide even more detail, using dozens of cases to exemplify the categories along the continuum. The New Evil also presents compelling evidence that, since a cultural tipping-point in the 1960s, certain types of violent crime have emerged that in earlier decades never or very rarely occurred.

I escaped once. From that house. That street. That place. And my parents. As a teenager - struggling with my sexuality after years of bullying and abuse - I left home and moved to another city, put together a new life and became a different person, while keeping my mental health struggles hidden from everyone. I came out and made friends. I fell in love and was cheated on. But it was life and I was finally getting to live it. Then a violent attack changed everything, so I ran away from it all. I moved abroad on my own. But even on an island in the sun I couldn't escape myself or my past. So...

In this fascinating, in-depth account of the hunt for serial killers, Colin Wilson, one of the world's leading authorities on the subject, examines the ways they can be tracked down and caught, from the tried-and-true methods of the early 20th century to the high-tech processes in use today. Wilson examines such areas as psychological profiling, genetic fingerprinting, and the launch of the Behavioral Science Unit. He delves into the importance of fantasy to serial killers, the urge to keep on killing, the desire to become notorious, and murder as an addictive drug.