Health Biographies

From insulin comas and lobotomy to incarceration and exile, Walter Brown chronicles the troubling history of the diagnosis and (often ineffective) treatment of bipolar disorder through the centuries, before the publication of a groundbreaking research paper in 1949. Cade's "Lithium Salts in the Treatment of Psychotic Excitement" described, for the first time, lithium's astonishing efficacy at both treating and preventing the recurrence of manic-depressive episodes, and would eventually transform the lives of patients, pharmaceutical researchers, and practicing physicians worldwide.

The two-time Emmy Award-winning actress has written her first book, a surprisingly raw and triumphant memoir that is outrageous, moving, sweet, tragic, and heartbreakingly honest. Guts is a true triumph - a memoir that manages to be as frank and revealing as Augusten Burroughs, yet as hilarious and witty as David Sedaris.

This is how Miranda Newman’s mother described the experience of trying to find an explanation for her daughter’s behaviour. It would be years before Miranda was able to find a diagnosis that explained the complicated way she moved through the world. She would have to advocate for herself in the mental health system while dealing with abuse, being unhoused, survival sex, suicide attempts and hospitalizations.

A week after her 41st birthday, the acclaimed poet Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living paycheck to paycheck who had always been the caregiver, the catastrophic illness was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness. The Undying explores the experience of illness as mediated by digital screens, weaving in ancient Roman dream diarists, cancer hoaxers and fetishists, cancer vloggers, pro-pain "dolorists", and the many little murders of capitalism.

A Sick Life chronicles Tionne's journey from a childhood spent in and out of the hospital, told she wouldn't live to see 30 or have children, to becoming the superstar musician who is still living out her life's dream of performing. For the first time, Tionne will tell her full life story - the diagnosis, the tumultuous rise to fame, the life in the spotlight, and the hard-fought advocacy work.

When the Dionne Quintuplets were born on May 28, 1934, weighing a grand total of just over 13 pounds, no one expected them to live so much as an hour. Overnight, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie Dionne mesmerized the globe, defying medical history with every breath they took. In an effort to protect them from hucksters and showmen, the Ontario government took custody of the five identical babies, sequestering them in a private, custom-built hospital across the road from their family - and, in a stunning act of hypocrisy, proceeded to exploit them for the next nine years.

The untold story of how one woman’s life was changed forever in a matter of seconds by a horrific trauma. Barbara Leaming’s extraordinary and deeply sensitive biography is the first book to document Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ brutal, lonely, and valiant 31-year struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following JFK’s assassination.Here is the woman as she has never been seen before.

Clever and ambitious, Emma Jung yearned to study the natural sciences at the University of Zurich. But the strict rules of proper Swiss society at the beginning of the 20th century dictated that a woman of Emma's stature - one of the richest heiresses in Switzerland - travel to Paris to "finish" her education, to prepare for marriage to a suitable man. Engaged to the son of one of her father's wealthy business colleagues, Emma's conventional and predictable life was upended when she met Carl Jung.

Weeks after giving birth, Holly Frances went from being a healthy 26-year-old new mom to paralyzed and on life support—in less than 72 hours. Diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disorder called Guillain-Barre Syndrome, Holly was trapped in her body, unable to move, speak, or hold her newborn daughter. Life Support tells the story of how Holly struggled to overcome the despair, hopelessness and physical pain, to regain her health and get back to being a mother to her daughter.

Michele Harper is a female African-American emergency room physician in a profession that is overwhelmingly male and white. Brought up in Washington, DC, in a complicated family, she went to Harvard, where she met her husband. They stayed together through medical school until two months before she was scheduled to join the staff of a hospital in central Philadelphia, when he told her he couldn't move with her. Her marriage at an end, Harper began her new life in a new city, in a new job, as a newly single woman.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is the most popular personality test in the world. It is used regularly by Fortune 500 companies, universities, hospitals, churches, and the military. Its language of personality types - extraversion and introversion, sensing and intuiting, thinking and feeling, judging and perceiving - has inspired television shows, Online dating platforms, and Buzzfeed quizzes. Yet despite the test's widespread adoption, experts in the field of psychometric testing, a $2 billion industry, have struggled to validate its results - no less account for its success.

One of the most influential living psychologists looks at the history of his life and discipline, and paints a much brighter future for everyone. When Martin E. P. Seligman first encountered psychology in the 1960s, the field was devoted to eliminating misery: it was the science of how past trauma creates present symptoms. Today, thanks in large part to Seligman's Positive Psychology movement, it is ever more focused not on what cripples life, but on what makes life worth living - with profound consequences for our mental health.

When Kerry Cohen reached her early 40s, she realized she had a drinking problem - just enough to blur the edges of her life that had become a monotony of working, carpooling the kids to school, and everyday distractions. What she also realized was that she wasn't the only one. Lush is a gripping memoir that examines Kerry's struggles with alcohol, a struggle that a rising number of middle-aged women are facing. Wonderfully poignant and relatable, Lush follows Kerry as she attempts to rediscover the awe in her life, leaving mistakes, regrets, and the bottle behind her.

Each time she knelt to "catch" another wriggling baby - nearly 3,000 times during her remarkable career - California midwife Peggy Vincent paid homage to the moment when pain bows to joy and the world makes way for one more. With every birth, she encounters another woman-turned-goddess: Catherine rides out her labor in a car careening down a mountain road. Sofia spends hers trying to keep her hyper doctor-father from burning down the house. Susannah gives birth so quietly that neither husband nor midwife notice until there's a baby in the room.

In this deeply moving and lyrical memoir, Hoppe shares an intimate, courageous account of what it means to truly interrupt cycles of harm. For fans of The Recovering by Leslie Jamison, Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley C. Ford, and Heavy by Kiese Laymon. During the first year of quarantine, drug overdoses spiked, the highest ever recorded. And Hoppe’s cousin was one of them. “I never learned the true history of substance use disorder in my family,” Hoppe writes. “People just disappeared.” At the time of her cousin’s death, she’d been in recovery for nearly four years, but she hadn’t told anyone.

The Headache Godfather traces the life of Seymour Diamond, MD, who was born in 1925, the son of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine and Slovakia, in Chicago, Illinois. Dr. Diamond revolutionized the practice of headache as a medical specialty when he opened the United States' first private headache practice, the Diamond Headache Clinic, in 1974. It quickly became a headache haven for sufferers from around the world.

Named president and CEO of NBC at the age of 43, he faced a two-headed dragon: on one hand, distrust from the network people deeply skeptical of the "suit" from GE, their new corporate parent; and on the other, fiscal oversight demands from a cautious, conservative institution reluctant to invest heavily in a media business they didn't understand. For the next 20 years, he managed to navigate the fine line between the two and in the process completely reinvent - and save - the network.

At one time Lew Alcindor was just another kid from New York City with all the usual problems: He struggled with fitting in, with pleasing a strict father, and with overcoming shyness that made him feel socially awkward. But with a talent for basketball and an unmatched team of supporters, Lew Alcindor was able to transform and to become Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Adolf Hitler is one of the most studied men in history, and yet the most important things we think we know about him are wrong. As Brendan Simms' major new biography shows, Hitler's main preoccupation was not, as widely believed, the threat of Bolshevism but that of international capitalism and Anglo-America. These two fears drove both his anti-Semitism and his determination to secure the 'living space' necessary to survive in a world dominated by the British Empire and the United States.

The New York Times best-selling true story of an all-American girl and a boy from Zimbabwe and the letter that changed both of their lives forever. It started as an assignment. Everyone in Caitlin's class wrote to an unknown student somewhere in a distant place. Martin was lucky to even receive a pen-pal letter. There were only 10 letters, and 50 kids in his class. But he was the top student, so he got the first one. That letter was the beginning of a correspondence that spanned six years and changed two lives.