Mental Illness

Pauline first became ill when she was 15. What seemed to be a urinary infection became joint pain, then life-threatening appendicitis. After a routine operation, Pauline lost all the strength in her legs. Shortly afterwards, convulsions started. But Pauline’s tests are normal: her symptoms seem to have no physical cause whatsoever. This may be an extreme case, but Pauline is not alone. As many as a third of people visiting their GPs have symptoms that are medically unexplained.

In 2017, 23-year old adult entertainment industry performer August Ames tragically took her own life. In the aftermath of her death, the media pointed the blame in all directions: social justice warriors who took issue with August's decision to not perform with a certain male performer; her husband, Kevin; a performer named Markus Dupree, who roughed August up during a film shooting; even her own family. For the first time since her death, August's mother Hilary opens up in a tell-all memoir about her life with and without her beloved daughter, better known to the family by her real name, ...

In Sleepyhead, science writer Henry Nicholls uses his own experience with chronic narcolepsy as a gateway to better understanding the cryptic, curious, and relatively uncharted world of sleep disorders. Charming, eye-opening, and deeply humanizing, Sleepyhead will help us all uncover the secrets of a good night's sleep.

Leigh Chen Sanders is absolutely certain about one thing: When her mother died by suicide, she turned into a bird. Leigh, who is half Asian and half white, travels to Taiwan to meet her maternal grandparents for the first time. There, she is determined to find her mother, the bird. In her search, she winds up chasing after ghosts, uncovering family secrets, and forging a new relationship with her grandparents.

In Fast Asleep, Dr. Michael Mosley brings together the latest, groundbreaking science to explain exactly why it is so important that we regularly get enough sleep. Prone to insomnia, he has taken part in numerous sleep experiments and tested every sleep remedy. Combining personal insight and in-depth research, he explains why so many of us struggle with sleep, what works and what doesn’t, and shares his own myth-busting program to help you achieve a good night’s rest.

How the Brain Lost Its Mind tells the rich and compelling story of two confounding ailments, syphilis and hysteria, and the extraordinary efforts to confront their effects on mental life. How does the mind work? Where does madness lie, in the brain or in the mind? How should it be treated?

In 1994, The Bell Curve and its controversial thesis catapulted the topic of genetic racial differences in IQ to the forefront of a renewed and heated debate. Now, in A Terrible Thing to Waste, award-winning science writer Harriet A. Washington adds her incisive analysis to the fray, arguing that IQ is a biased and flawed metric, but that it is useful for tracking cognitive damage. Featuring extensive scientific research and Washington's sharp, lively reporting, A Terrible Thing to Waste is sure to outrage, transform the conversation, and inspire debate.

Six months after the fall of The Program, ex-handler Michael Realm is struggling with his guilt. After all, he was instrumental in erasing the memories of several patients - including one he claimed to love. With a lifetime of regret stretched before him, Realm vows to set things right.

Zachary is a recovering alcoholic on the brink of destruction. Zachary’s traumatizing religious childhood still haunts his unhealthy behaviors, today. Is therapy treatment without the therapist meeting Zachary’s parents—especially his mom—possible? Zachary’s girlfriend, Brittany, is unaware of his psychological ulterior motive. Zachary’s therapist, Dr. Lily, figures out his ulterior motive. Zachary becomes enraged at Dr. Lily and fears losing Brittany. Brittany learns some of her behaviors weren’t healthy. Zachary resorts to extreme violence to silence Dr. Lily. Brittany ...

The author describes in detail all the insanity, disturbing behaviors, oppressive symptoms, and various feeling associated with the mental battles within her own mind. The author suffers from clinical depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, and borderline personality disorder. She struggles with suicidal thoughts and attempts, self-mutilating behaviors, mania, paranoia, anxiety, and psychosis with intense hallucinations of all five of her senses, and multiple delusions, including the belief that she is the "second-coming of Christ".

Three years ago mortuary cosmetologist Phoebe Glassman lost her husband in a tragic accident. No longer the hopeful wife and mother she once was, Phoebe is disappearing into her grief and into the quietude of her job - restoring to the dead the illusion of life. Then the body of a woman named Pauline Steele arrives in the mortuary, and for Phoebe, everything changes. Pauline is unmistakably Phoebe’s mirror image and bears an alarmingly familiar tattoo. Even more startling is that among Pauline’s effects is a faded photograph of Phoebe.

CBT is a treatment modality that is used to help individuals change their maladaptive thinking patterns. The premise of this technique is that when a person changes his maladaptive thinking patterns that it leads to changes in emotion and behavior as well. This process requires a significant amount of self-awareness because participants not only work to adjust their mindsets but they have to make extensive changes in their behavioral patterns, as well.

As the sun lowered in the sky one Friday afternoon in April 2006, acclaimed author Donald Antrim found himself on the roof of his Brooklyn apartment building, afraid for his life. In this moving memoir, Antrim vividly recounts what led him to the roof and what happened after he came back down: two hospitalizations, weeks of fruitless clinical trials, the terror of submitting to ECT - and the saving call from David Foster Wallace that convinced him to try it - as well as years of fitful recovery and setback.

So how do you flip your mind from a negative spiral into realistic and rebellious hope? How do you stop focusing on the why and realise that 'why not me' is just as valid a question? How we learn to respond to any given situation empowers us or destroys us. We have the ability in our minds to dictate our own outcomes—bad or good—and with the right skills and approach, we can be the master of our lives. How to Live When You Could Be Dead will show you how. It will awaken you to question your life as if you didn't have a tomorrow and live it in the way you want to today.

In this compassionate and empowering book, noted psychologists Gordon J. G. Asmundson and Steven Taylor provide simple and accurate self-tests designed to help you understand health anxiety and the role it might be playing in how you feel. Concrete examples and helpful exercises show you how to change thought and behavior patterns that contribute to the aches, pains, and anxiety you're experiencing. The authors also explain how to involve friends and family - and when to seek professional help - as you learn to stay well without worry.

An office building is locked up for the bank holiday weekend. Four women have hidden inside for personal reasons. They have lots of time to reflect on life. Why are they there? Who comes out? This is a drama that plays out through stories told. Sometimes sad, sometimes happy, often explicit; let readers tell you: “Brilliantly portrayed and to be honest after the ending, it made me want to read it again.” WC “It is impossible to put down and fascinating reading.” KG “ Like a rabbit caught in the headlights of a car, not knowing whether to be amazed, shocked, admiring, puzzled or ...

Parker, a young, overconfident psychiatrist new to his job at a mental asylum, miscalculates catastrophically when he undertakes curing a mysterious and profoundly dangerous patient.

What if finding her means losing himself? Seventeen-year-old Bo has always had delusions that he could travel through time. When he was 10, Bo claimed to have witnessed the Titanic hit an iceberg, and at 15, he found himself on a Civil War battlefield, horrified by the bodies surrounding him. So when his concerned parents send him to a school for troubled youth, Bo assumes he knows the truth: that he's actually attending Berkshire Academy, a school for kids who, like Bo, have "superpowers".

An electrifying true story of one young woman's nightmarish descent into the hell of schizophrenia and her courageous battle to rejoin the real world, such is the story of Lori Schiller. Once she had it all - a loving family, devoted friends, intelligence, and opportunity. Then at age 15 she began to suffer from symptoms of schizophrenia, hearing voices that began to take over her life. At 23, she committed herself to a private mental institution and spent the next 7 years waging a war against the voices that urged her to kill her family, her doctor, herself. This account of a journey into and out of madness is at once gripping, heartening, and ultimately triumphant.

In addition to working well for physical ailments, homeopathy offers remedies for engaging with the subconscious mind to ameliorate embedded, existential causes of chronic illness— called “miasms.” Jerry M. Kantor presents diagnostic insight, specific homeopathic remedies, and successful case studies about the profound connections between emotions and their physical manifestations in illness.