Mental Health Biography

Melissa Broder always struggled with anxiety. In the fall of 2012, she went through a harrowing cycle of panic attacks and dread that wouldn't abate for months. So she began @sosadtoday, an anonymous Twitter feed that allowed her to express her darkest feelings and that quickly gained a dedicated following. In So Sad Today, Broder delves deeper into the existential themes she explores on Twitter.

Small towns are places where everyone knows each other’s names—and each other’s business, despite it being none of their own. Yet, folks in small towns never seem to want to talk about mental health. Rural living can be isolating with hours spent on the farm caring for the land, animals, the home, and everyone else first before yourself. Women especially know this struggle all too well. Author Lewellyn Melnyk has experienced this her whole life, suffering from depression in her early teens that left her with what felt like only one option.

In kindergarten, Jarrett Krosoczka's teacher asks him to draw his family, with a mommy and a daddy. But Jarrett's family is much more complicated than that. His mom is an addict, in and out of rehab, and in and out of Jarrett's life. His father is a mystery - Jarrett doesn't know where to find him, or even what his name is. Jarrett lives with his grandparents - two very loud, very loving, very opinionated people who had thought they were through with raising children until Jarrett came along. Only as a teenager can Jarrett begin to piece together the truth of his family.

For as long as he can remember, BJ Daniels ate, slept and breathed football. He became a star quarterback at the University of South Florida and went on to play professionally in the NFL, winning the Super Bowl with the Seattle Seahawks in 2013. In many ways, it seemed like BJ was living every athlete's dream. However, he also saw first-hand the lows that accompany being a football player at the highest level.

The millions of North Americans who silently cope with anxiety at last have a witty, articulate champion in Patricia Pearson, who shows that the anxious are hardly "nervous nellies" with "weak characters" who just need medicine and a pat on the head. Instead, Pearson questions what it is about today's culture that is making people anxious, and offers some surprising answers - as well as some inspiring solutions based on her own fierce battle to drive the beast away.

At first glance, Josh Hanagarne seems an improbable librarian. He stands 6'7", competes in strongman contests, and was diagnosed in high school with Tourette's syndrome. But books are his first love - Josh's earliest memories involve fantastic adventures between the pages of Gulliver’s Travels and a passionate infatuation with Fern from Charlotte’s Web. Everything in Josh’s life - from his Mormon upbringing, to finally finding love, to learning to control his tics through lifting - circles back to a close connection with books.

The debut of an important new literary voice: Marin Sardy's extraordinarily affecting, fiercely intelligent memoir unflinchingly traces the path of the schizophrenia that runs in her family. Against the starkly beautiful backdrop of Anchorage, Alaska, where the author grew up, Marin Sardy weaves a fearless account of the shapeless thief - the schizophrenia - that kept her mother immersed in a world of private delusion and later manifested in her brother, ultimately claiming his life.

Dr. Loren A. Olson has frequently been asked two questions: How could you not know that you were gay until the age of forty? Wasn't your marriage just a sham to protect yourself at your wife's expense? In Finally Out, Dr. Olson vigorously answers both questions by telling the inspiring story of his evolving sexuality, into which he intelligently weaves psychological concepts and gay history.

From Marine sniper Jake Wood comes a riveting memoir of leading over 100,000 veterans to a life of renewed service, volunteering to battle, hurricanes, tornados, wildfires, pandemics, and civil wars, and inspiring onlookers as their unique military training saved lives and rebuilt our country.

An Unexplained Death is an obsessive investigation into a mysterious death at the Belvedere - a once-grand hotel - and a poignant, gripping meditation on suicide and voyeurism.

The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump provides a coherent and nuanced psychological portrait of Donald Trump, drawing upon biographical events in the subject's life and contemporary scientific research and theory in personality, developmental, and social psychology.

In 1907 Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung began what promised to be both a momentous collaboration and the deepest friendship of each man's life. Six years later they were bitter antagonists, locked in a savage struggle that was as much personal and emotional as it was theoretical and professional. In between them stood a young woman named Sabina Spielrein, who had been both patient and lover to Jung and colleague and confidante to Freud before going on to become an innovative psychoanalyst herself.

Craig Russell was an internationally admired entertainer and actor, known for his outrageous impersonations of some of Hollywood's greatest female celebrities: Mae West, Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler, Carol Channing, and Judy Garland, to name a few. Lori Russell Eadie, a shy theater lover, was Craig's number-one fan and, eventually, his wife. Together they were fun, fabulous, and eschewed convention. But behind the curtains, Craig and Lori's lives were troubled by their mental health, drug addiction, sexual assault, and abuse.

The trial of 25-year-old Casey Anthony for the death of her daughter, Caylee, was the most sensational case in America since O.J. Simpson’s. After being acquitted in July 2011, Ms. Anthony instantly became one of the most infamous women in the world. Dr. Keith Ablow distills tens of thousands of pages of documents he has obtained, his behind-the-camera, one-on one interviews, and his decades of experience in the world of forensic psychiatry to make sense of this troubled young woman.

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.

Diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder at the age of eight, Camilla Pang struggled to understand the world around her. Desperate for a solution, she asked her mother if there was an instruction manual for humans that she could consult. With no blueprint to life, Pang began to create her own, using the language she understands best: Science. That lifelong project eventually resulted in An Outsider's Guide to Humans, an original and incisive exploration of human nature and the strangeness of social norms, written from the outside looking in.

Abbey Curran was born with cerebral palsy, but early on she resolved never to let it limit her. Abbey made history when she became the first contestant with a disability to win a major beauty pageant. After earning the title of Miss Iowa, she went on to compete in Miss USA.

Tony Hsieh—CEO of Zappos, Las Vegas developer, and beloved entrepreneur—was famous for spreading happiness. He promoted a workplace where bosses treated employees like family members, where stress was replaced by playfulness, and where hierarchies were replaced with equality and collaboration. Happy at Any Cost sheds light on one of our most creative yet vulnerable business leaders. It’s about our intense need to find “happiness” at all costs, our misguided worship of entrepreneurs, the stigmas surrounding mental health, and how fame can mask deeper problems.

A revelatory examination of the most significant demographic shift since the baby boom—the sharp increase in the number of people who live alone—that offers surprising insights on the benefits of this epochal change. With eye-opening statistics, original data, and vivid portraits of people who go solo, Klinenberg upends the conventional wisdom to deliver the definitive take on how the rise of living alone is transforming the American experience.

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.