Psychology Memoirs

How do you defend your mind from those who exploit it without you even knowing? Serial killers, master manipulators—they don’t only happen on TV. By the time they’re part of a true crime documentary, it’s too late. Understanding the dark psychology behind them is your best defense.

It happens to us all: We think we’ve settled into an identity, a self, and then out of nowhere and with great force, the traces of our parents appear to us, in us - in mirrors, in gestures, in reaction and reactivity, at weddings and funerals, and in troubled thoughts that crouch in dark corners of our minds. In this masterful collection of new essays, the apple looks at the tree.

Nina McCall was one of many women unfairly imprisoned by the United States government throughout the 20th century. Tens, probably hundreds, of thousands of women and girls were locked up - usually without due process - simply because officials suspected these women were prostitutes, carrying STIs, or just "promiscuous." This discriminatory program, dubbed the "American Plan", lasted from the 1910s into the 1950s, implicating a number of luminaries, including Eleanor Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller Jr., Earl Warren, and even Eliot Ness.

In Playing Hurt, a leading figure in the sports world - the quintessential "man's man" who seems to have it all - confesses his constant battle with depression. John Saunders welcomes listeners into the heart of his desperate struggle through insights into the root causes of depression and explanations of modern medical and homeopathic treatments.

It was a seemingly pleasant evening on October 1, 2017, and more than 20,000 people gathered at the Route 91 Harvest Festival. Everyone was in high spirits and the concert began to a thrilling fanfare. Unbeknownst to everyone, sounds began to erupt which were thought to be fireworks...until people started falling as dead bodies. The Las Vegas shooting was the deadliest attack in modern American history that claimed 58 lives and injured over 850. This is the story of the assailant Stephen Paddock.

In this brilliant portrayal of lovers who kill and the men and women who are their unwitting victims, Ann Rule expertly analyzes shocking, headline-making cases, unmasking the motives that transform sex and passion into deadly crimes.

In the 1970s and early '80s, southern California was shocked when dead boys began turning up with disturbing regularity alongside some of the state's most heavily traveled freeways. Victims of sadistic torture, the dead boys and young men had been raped and strangled, and their untimely deaths were eventually attributed to the Freeway Killer, an elusive psychopath whose trail of death would go down in California history as one of the worst true crime stories in the country.

My Good Bright Wolf is a memoir about thinking and reading, eating and not eating, about privilege and scarcity, about the relationships that form us and the long tentacles of childhood. Sarah confronts all of this in a book that pushes at the boundaries of memoir-writing. Opening in the second person, it narrates contested memories of girlhood at the hands of embattled, distracted parents in a time of disastrous attitudes towards eating and female discipline.

The struggles and humiliations of adolescence are told in an unflinching, funny, surprisingly universal tale of one good Jewish girl's battle with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

Canadians fell in love with Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s beautiful and high-spirited bride when he brought her to the world stage as the youngest First Lady in the history of the country. But the situation wasn’t as rosy as it seemed. Plagued by mood swings and unprepared for public life, Margaret became increasingly isolated at 24 Sussex, as her depression alternated with bouts of mania. As her behavior became more puzzling - even to Margaret herself - she did her best to mother her three young sons.

What is it about killers, cults and cannibals that capture our imaginations even as they terrify and disturb us? How do we carefully consume these cases, and what can they teach us about what makes victims and their murderers our collective responsibility? Redhanded rejects the outdated narrative of killers as monsters and that a victim 'was just in the wrong place at the wrong time'. Instead, it dissects the stories of killers in a way that challenges perceptions and asks the hard questions about society, gender, poverty, culture and even our politics.

In 1990, a young woman was strangled on a jogging path near the home of Pat Brown and her family. Brown suspected the young man who was renting a room in her house, and quickly uncovered strong evidence that pointed to him - but the police dismissed her as merely a housewife with an overactive imagination. It would be six years before her former boarder would be brought in for questioning, but the night Brown took action to solve the murder was the beginning of her life's work.

What do doctors actually think about when you list your problems in the consulting room? Are they really listening to you? Is the connection all in your head? Every day for 10 years - even while his hospital became the set for a reality television series - clinical neuropsychologist A. K. Benjamin confronted these questions, and this book is his attempt to tell the truth about what happens in these rooms in hospitals the world over.

Dr. Temple Grandin gets to the real issues of autism, the ones parents, teachers, and individuals on the spectrum face every day. Temple offers helpful dos and don'ts, practical strategies, and try-it-now tips, all based on her insider perspective and a great deal of research.

Susan Doherty's groundbreaking book brings us a population of lost souls, ill-served by society, feared, shunted from locked wards to rooming houses to the streets to jail and back again. For the past ten years, some of the people who cycle in and out of the severely ill wards of the Douglas Institute in Montreal have found a friend in Susan, who volunteers on the ward, and then follows her friends out into the world as they struggle to get through their days. With their full cooperation, she brings us their stories, which challenge the ways we think about people with mental illness.

Esmé Weijun Wang was officially diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder in 2013, although the hallucinations and psychotic episodes had started years before that. In the midst of a high functioning life at Yale, Stanford and the literary world, she would find herself floored by an overwhelming terror that 'spread like blood', or convinced that she was dead, or that her friends were robots, or spiders were eating holes in her brain.

Hemingway's Brain is an innovative biography and the first forensic psychiatric examination of Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway. After committing 17 years to researching Hemingway's life and medical history, Andrew Farah, a forensic psychiatrist, has concluded that the writer's diagnoses were incorrect. Contrary to the commonly accepted diagnoses of bipolar disorder and alcoholism, Farah provides a comprehensive explanation of the medical conditions that led to Hemingway's suicide.

In the Shadow of Fame, by the daughter of world-renowned psychoanalyst and theorist Erik Erikson, is the intimate story of her struggle to come to terms with her father's fame and to develop a sense of self in a family, and world, in which being famous is the very definition of being a worthwhile human being. And, while her story is unique in its personal details, it is also a description of the struggle faced by all of us in a modern world.

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.

Plagued by depression her entire life, it wasn’t until her early 50s that writer and book critic Bethanne Patrick, advocating for her own care, received a medical diagnosis that would set her on the path to wellness and stability. Recognizing the intergenerational effects of trauma and mental health struggles, Patrick unearths the stories of her past in order to forge a better future for herself and her two daughters, dismantling the stigmas surrounding mental health challenges that can plague families into silence and resignation.