Mental Disorders

Borderline personality disorder, autism, narcissism, psychosis, Asperger's: All of these syndromes have one thing in common---lack of empathy. In some cases, this absence can be dangerous, but in others it can simply mean a different way of seeing the world. In The Science of Evil, Simon Baron-Cohen, an award-winning British researcher who has investigated psychology and autism for decades, develops a new brain-based theory of human cruelty.

This book provides a much-needed resource for family and friends of the more than five million American adults suffering from bipolar disorder. From psychotic behavior that requires medication to milder mood swings with disturbing ups and down, this book offers a warm and often humorous user-friend guide for coping with bipolar loved ones, colleagues, and friends.

We are often too busy or preoccupied to attend to our emotions until they hit with the strength of a tornado. When signs of anxiety and panic appear, they ravage our lives, our dreams, and our spirit. It is now possible to stop anxiety from stopping us in our tracks. In her book, Dr. Odessky helps you understand the process of anxiety, and how to arm yourself with strategies that work. Dr. Odessky draws on her 15 years of clinical experience to guide you through the process of not only learning how to overcome anxiety, but also how to enrich your life.

Mainstream health science has let you down. Weight loss is not the key to health, diet and exercise are not effective weight-loss strategies, and fatness is not a death sentence. Body Respect debunks common myths about weight, including the misconceptions that BMI can accurately measure health, that fatness necessarily leads to disease, and that dieting will improve health. The authors also help make sense of how poverty and oppression - such as racism, homophobia, and classism - affect life opportunity, self-worth, and even influence metabolism.

Having a child with "extreme" picky eating is frustrating and sometimes scary. Children with feeding disorders, food aversions, or selective eating often experience anxiety around food, and the power struggles can negatively impact your relationship with your child. Helping Your Child with Extreme Picky Eating offers hope. After gaining a foundation of understanding of your child's challenges and the dynamics at play, you'll be ready for the five steps that transform feeding and meals, so your child can learn to enjoy a variety of foods in the right amounts for healthy growth.

Fire Child, Water Child is a revolutionary guide to parenting a child with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) that does not rely on medication or pathologizing your child's challenges. This method helps you identify your child's unique focusing style - wood, fire, earth, metal, or water - and calm the stress that can contribute to your child's ADHD symptoms.

This confessional self-help guide explores the complex emotional truth of what it’s like when food, weight, and body image take priority over every other human impulse or action. Activist author Marissa LaRocca’s revelatory tale includes her struggle with her secrets, including sexuality, and how she emerged as an outspoken advocate for gay rights and women’s health issues.

We all have people in our lives who frustrate, annoy, or hurt us: workplace bullies, those who always claim to be right, or those with anxious or obsessive personalities. And most of us hurt others occasionally, too. Now, authors Dr. Helen McGrath, a clinical psychologist and professor, and Hazel Edwards, a professional writer, offer this extremely practical guide to dealing with the difficult personalities we encounter every day - in others, and in ourselves.

Have you ever wondered "Why did I do that?" or "Why can't I just control my behavior?" Others may judge our reactions and think, "What's wrong with that person?" When questioning our emotions, it's easy to place the blame on ourselves; holding ourselves and those around us to an impossible standard. It's time we started asking a different question. Through deeply personal conversations, Oprah Winfrey and renowned brain and trauma expert Dr. Bruce Perry offer a groundbreaking and profound shift from asking “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?”

New hope for those suffering from conditions like depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, addictions, PTSD, ADHD, and more. Though incidence of these conditions is skyrocketing, for the past four decades standard treatment hasn’t much changed, and success rates in treating them have barely improved, either. Meanwhile, the stigma of the “mental illness” label - damaging and devastating on its own - can often prevent sufferers from getting the help they need. Brain specialist and best-selling author Dr. Daniel Amen aims to change all that.

In this no-nonsense guide for men, psychologist Jonas Horwitz presents straightforward, jargon-free strategies to help you identify and overcome depression, once and for all. With this unique guide, you'll learn why it's so important to take your severe depression seriously - just as you would if you had cancer, heart disease, diabetes, or any other life-threatening illness. In addition, by viewing your depression into a separate entity - The Beast - you'll discover how it tries to trick you when you are most stressed to do things that leave you feeling much more depressed.

You live in a world that wasn't designed for you. A world where you're expected to sit still, stay quiet, and focus. Because of the way your brain is wired, you can feel like you’re failing at life. But you are not failing. You are awesome. Award-winning content creators Kim and Penn Holderness are on a mission to reboot how we think about the unfortunately named "attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder." As always, they are doing it by looking in the mirror, because they don't just study ADHD; they live it.

This powerful book, based on cutting-edge research and cognitive behavioral strategies, will help you develop the know-how to effectively manage teen anxiety. You'll learn the best ways to support your teen in overcoming problematic thinking and fears, discover what behaviors and coping strategies unwittingly make anxiety worse, and understand how anxiety is best defeated with surprisingly counterintuitive methods.

Loving Someone with Anxiety is one of the few books written specifically for the partners of people with anxiety disorders. You'll learn the importance of setting healthy boundaries, limiting codependent behaviors, and why taking over roles that make your partner anxious - such as answering the phone, driving, or doing the grocery shopping because your partner feels too anxious to be in public - can be extremely damaging for the both of you.

Patric Gagne realized she made others uncomfortable before she started kindergarten. Something about her caused people to react in a way she didn’t understand. She suspected it was because she didn’t feel things the way other kids did. Emotions like fear, guilt, and empathy eluded her. For the most part, she felt nothing. And she didn’t like the way that “nothing” felt.

First-time novelist Natasha Friend is a writer with a talent for realistically expressing the fears and uncertainties of today’s adolescents in a good story. Perfect has received the Milkweed Prize for Children’s Literature and is a Book Sense "Winter Picks" selection. This is the moving story of a young girl who develops a dangerous eating disorder while dealing with intense grief.

In the insightful narrative tradition of Oliver Sacks, Monkey Mind is an uplifting, smart, and very funny memoir of life with anxiety - America’s most common psychological complaint. We all think we know what being anxious feels like - it is the instinct that made us run from wolves in the prehistoric age and pushes us to perform in the modern one - but for forty million American adults, anxiety is an insidious condition that defines daily life. Yet no popular memoir has been written about that experience - until now.

When someone has obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), it can affect the entire family. This book is an essential guide to help family members cope with their loved one's compulsive behaviors, obsessions, and constant need for reassurance.

Imagine waking in a hospital bed to find your frail pale arm punctured by an IV transferring fluids and nutrients into your weak, stiff body. You just had a seizure precipitated by your chronic struggle with unacknowledged eating disorders (ED). Living Full is author Danielle Sherman-Lazar's story. Filled with pop culture references, humor, and delivered with raw honesty about the escalating and dangerous behaviors of a person acting out the mental illness of ED, Living Full chronicles Danielle Sherman-Lazar's step-by-step descent into the nightmare that is full-blown ED.

The Golden Gate Bridge is one of the most recognizable structures to define a modern city. Yet, for author Kevin Hines the bridge is not merely a marker of a place or a time. Instead, the bridge marks the beginning of his remarkable story. At 19-years-old, Kevin attempted to take his own life by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge - a distance which took four seconds to fall. Recently diagnosed with bi-polar disorder, Kevin had begun to hear voices telling him he had to die, and days before his attempt, he began to believe them. The fall would break his body, but not his spirit.