Mental Illness

In a powerful and gripping debut, Rachel Aviv raises fundamental questions about how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. Animated by a profound sense of empathy, Aviv’s exploration is refracted through her own account of living in a hospital ward at the age of six and meeting a fellow patient with whom her life runs parallel—until it no longer does.

An intimate, compassionate, and expansive portrait of Borderline Personality Disorder that rejects the conventional wisdom that this condition is untreatable, told by a psychologist who specializes in BPD....

August Griffin has lived with mental illness and Tourette’s Syndrome his entire life. For the last five years, he has bounced in and out of the hospital, adding strain to his already precarious living situation with his ailing mother. Life is an uphill battle... that is, until he meets Marnie Robertson in the hospital’s psychiatric ward. The two are complete opposites. Where August is shy and timid, she is wild and vivacious. Where he is poor, she comes from a wealthy family. Despite their differences, August and Marnie share, not only their personal struggles, but their love for ...

Dr. Oliver Sacks argues the migraine cannot be understood simply as an illness, but must be viewed as a complex condition with a unique role to play in each individual's life.

Nearly half of US citizens over the age of 85 are suffering from some kind of dementia and require care. Loving Someone Who Has Dementia is a new kind of caregiving book. It's not about the usual techniques, but about how to manage on-going stress and grief. The book is for caregivers, family members, friends, and neighbors, as well as educators and professionals - anyone touched by the epidemic of dementia. Dr. Boss helps caregivers find hope in "ambiguous loss" - having a loved one both here and not here, physically present but psychologically absent.

The human mind is an incomprehensible mystery because knowing it is something more puzzling than that. The reason is that every human being has an individual mind. There is a world for him in it. It is very difficult to understand another person. Because everyone is in their world. They can only think of others if they know the ways to get out of their world. If not, they will understand others only with the events of their world. I seek to explain about that incomprehensible world here. Let me start with something they understand first. The reason is that they can only start this from ...

Kelsey Reed, white collar crime’s favorite forensic accountant, finds the fraud behind the false front of numbers. When she takes a job in the Pacific Northwest, she’s stalked at the Portland airport; her hotel room is ransacked; and her life is threatened by a gunman. During the snowstorm of the century, Kelsey disappears. Between Jack Hopper – the attorney that hired her and falls in love with her, and Tee Boone – PI extraordinaire, she is found. Does the insanity in the O’Doul family empire reside only in the mother, or does it run through the whole family? If only Kelsey can ...

Blake Butler and Molly Brodak instantly connected, fell in love, married, and built a life together. Both writers with deep roots in contemporary American literature, their union was an iconic joining of forces between two major and beloved talents. Nearly three years into their marriage, grappling with mental illness and a lifetime of trauma, Molly took her own life. In the days and weeks after Molly’s death, Blake discovered shocking secrets she had held back from the world, fundamentally altering his view of their relationship and who she was.

Are you sometimes perplexed with Jesus' teaching? Do you really want what he wants? Best-selling author Kyle Idleman reveals that the key to the abundant life Jesus promised lies in embracing his inside-out way of life. As he examines Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, Kyle unpacks the many counterintuitive truths, including: brokenness is the way to wholeness, mourning is the path to blessing, and emptiness is required in order to know true fullness.

In Remember, neuroscientist and acclaimed novelist Lisa Genova delves into how memories are made and how we retrieve them. You'll learn whether forgotten memories are temporarily inaccessible or erased forever and why some memories are built to exist for only a few seconds (like a passcode) while others can last a lifetime (your wedding day). You'll come to appreciate the clear distinction between normal forgetting (where you parked your car) and forgetting due to Alzheimer's (that you own a car).

When a car crash sidelines Mickey just before softball season, she has to find a way to hold on to her spot as the catcher for a team expected to make a historic tournament run. Behind the plate is the only place she’s ever felt comfortable, and the painkillers she’s been prescribed can help her get there. The pills do more than take away pain; they make her feel good. But as the pressure to be Mickey Catalan heightens, her need increases, and it becomes less about pain and more about want, something that could send her spiraling out of control.

A real-life Talented Mr. Ripley, the unbelievable 30-year run of a shape-shifting con man. The story of Clark Rockefeller is a stranger-than-fiction twist on the classic American success story of the self-made man-because Clark Rockefeller was totally made up. The career con man who convincingly passed himself off as Rockefeller was born in a small village in Germany.

The mean streets of Skid Row teem with unhappy characters. Each has his or her own sordid tale to tell about their current condition and the sorry fate that deposited them there. Meet ""Narrator"", a documentary film maker who has come to interview these hapless souls. Through the lens of his camera, he hopes to improve his understanding of their plight and the struggles they confront in their daily quest for survival. His story will focus on a minor mystery with major implications. Who killed Cassandra's cat? And why?

In early 2021, popular artist Anna Marie Tendler checked herself into a psychiatric hospital following a year of crippling anxiety, depression and self-harm. Over two weeks, she underwent myriad psychological tests, participated in numerous therapy sessions, connected with fellow patients and experienced profound breakthroughs, such as when a doctor noted, “There is a you inside that feels invisible to those looking at you from the outside.”

Mental Illness & Christianity plays like a friend is encouraging you over a cup of coffee, she just happens to have the bible verses ready so that the conversation can be led by God’s word. If you’re looking for God’s way in a relationship with someone who sparks frustration or strife in your life, this book will give you some things to think about as it pertains to your role, using your spiritual gifts, and being sanctified in his truth.

Moving, harrowing, and ultimately uplifting, Lori Schiller's memoir is a classic testimony to the ravages of mental illness and the power of perseverance and courage. At 17, Lori Schiller was the perfect child - the only daughter of an affluent, close-knit family. Six years later she made her first suicide attempt, then wandered the streets of New York City dressed in ragged clothes, tormenting voices crying out in her mind. Lori Schiller had entered the horrifying world of full-blown schizophrenia.

When Nancy Hennessy is murdered, she leaves behind two best friends, an adoring husband and daughter, and a secret lover whose identity she took to the grave. Nancy was gorgeous, wealthy, and cherished by those who knew her - from the outside, her life was perfect. But as the investigation into her death flounders and her friends Eleanor and Mary wrestle with their grief, dark details surface that reveal how little they knew their friend, each other, and maybe even themselves.

The search for hope is most urgent at the patient's bedside. The Anatomy of Hope takes us there, bringing us into the lives of people at pivotal moments when they reach for and find hope, or when it eludes their grasp. Through these intimate portraits, we learn how to distinguish true hope from false, why some people feel they are undeserving of it, and whether we should ever abandon our search.

If you’re the family member of an addict, you may feel confused, guilty, and scared of doing the wrong thing. And when you don’t know how to help, you may find yourself in a codependent role. Addict in the House offers a pragmatic, step-by-step guide to dealing with a loved one’s addiction, from accepting the reality of the disease to surviving what may be repeated cycles of recovery and relapse. You’ll learn how to encourage your addicted loved one to get help without forcing it and finally find the strength to let go of codependence.

A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the listener. Set in a place beyond good and evil—literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul—it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis.