Mental Health Memoir

Dan Mathews knew that his witty, bawdy 78-year-old mother, Perry, was unable to maintain her fierce independence - so he flew her across the country to Virginia to live with him in an 1870 townhouse badly in need of repairs. But to Dan, a screwdriver is a cocktail not a tool, and he was soon overwhelmed with two fixer-uppers: the house and his mother.

From the moment Lotte first met Ben, she knew they were meant to be together. And for a few years, their life was truly idyllic: flourishing careers, adored friends, and travel to every corner of the planet. But when Ben was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, Lotte was catapulted into the uncharted landscape of cancer medicine, becoming his caregiver overnight. With the world around them in lockdown, they refused to give up the fight for his survival, travelling from London to Mexico in hope of a cure at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Professor Angela Gallop has been at the forefront of forensics for more than 45 years. During her remarkable career, she has established and run forensic science laboratories and has worked on thousands of cases in the UK and across the world. In How to Solve a Crime, she describes some of her own and her colleagues most intriguing cases and the wide range of skills and techniques used to solve them.

Beginning in the 1950s, William Masters and Virginia Johnson convinced hundreds of people to shed their clothes and copulate—in the name of science. For more than 40 years, the pair served as the nation's top experts on love, sex, and intimacy. In this eye-opening work, critically acclaimed biographer Thomas Maier presents an unprecedented look at the research team of Masters and Johnson, their pioneering studies of intimacy, and their lasting impact on the love lives of men and women. Masters of Sex offers a titillating portrait of the team's real-life story.

Jeffrey Dahmer was one of the most fascinating, memorable, and gruesome serial killers in American history who took the lives of 17 young men and boys between 1978 and 1991. He was a grotesque serial rapist, cannibal, and necrophiliac who the world will never forget. In this book, we discover just what the man who got a 900+ year prison sentence got up to in his spare time, and what shaped him as a person. This series is narrated in the classic cut-and-dry factual style that true crime fans enjoy, leaving out distractions, opinions, and unnecessary embellishments.

Maude Julien's parents were fanatics who believed it was their sacred duty to turn her into the ultimate survivor - raising her in isolation, tyrannizing her childhood, and subjecting her to endless drills designed to "eliminate weakness". Maude learned to hold an electric fence for minutes without flinching and to sit perfectly still in a rat-infested cellar all night long (her mother sewed bells onto her clothes that would give her away if she moved). She endured a life without heat, hot water, adequate food, friendship, or any kind of affectionate treatment.

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.

Are you happy? Does it matter? Increasingly, governments seem to think so. As the UK government conducts its first happiness survey, Alastair Campbell looks at happiness as a political as well as a personal issue; what it should mean to us, what it means to him.

Paris Fury is Tyson's rock, the wife he thanks for all his success. Both from Traveller families, she married him at 19 and is hands-on mother to their six children, as well as at his side through every fight. Always glamorous, strong, grounded and her own woman. When Tyson's struggles with depression, OCD and alcohol have threatened to overwhelm them, she has held them together and helped to see Tyson through to the greatest boxing victories. With all her warmth, humour and honesty, she tells her story.

In this provocative book, award-winning journalist Patricia Pearson argues that our culture is in denial of women's innate capacity for aggression. We don't believe that women batter their husbands or abuse the majority of children in North America. We ignore the 200 percent increase in crime by women in a period when most crime statistics are dropping. Pearson weaves the stories of women such as Karla Homolka and Mary Beth Tinning (who smothered eight of her children) with the results of criminologists and psychiatrists to expose the myth of female innocence.

If you struggle with a highly sensitive personality, this memoir and collection of stories will help you heal and flourish. Benita A. Esposito is a licensed professional counselor and best-selling author with four decades of professional experience. Even smart high-achievers have themes on their hero’s journey to the authentic self, and these were hers. What unconsciously drew her to an emotionally distant relationship or an emotionally abusive relationship? Why did she feel so hurt when others judged her? Why was she so tired? What compelled her toward self actualization?

Twenty-seven-year-old Sarah Thebarge had it all - a loving boyfriend, an Ivy League degree, and a successful career - when her life was derailed by an unthinkable diagnosis: aggressive breast cancer. After surviving the grueling treatments - though just barely - Sarah moved to Portland, Oregon, to start over. There, a chance encounter with an exhausted African mother and her daughters transformed her life again.

It should have been Rebecca Schiller's dream come true: moving her young family to the English countryside to raise goats and coax their own fruit and vegetables from the land. Instead, Rebecca's health begins to crumble, with bewildering symptoms: frequent falls, uncontrollable rages, and mysterious lapses in memory. Her diagnosis finally comes: severe ADHD. Written in unsparing, luminous prose, this is an all-absorbing memoir of one woman's newfound neurodivergence—and a clarion call to overturn the narrative that says minds are either normal and good or different and broken.

Jen Lancaster is here to take a hard look at our elevating anxieties, and with self-deprecating wit and levelheaded wisdom, she charts a path out of the quagmire that keeps us frightened of the future and ashamed of our imperfectly perfect human lives. Take a deep breath, and her advice, and you just might get through a holiday dinner without wanting to disown your uncle.

Sabrina Pace-Humphreys is a 43-year-old mother of four and grandmother of two, an award-winning businesswoman, an ultrarunner, a social justice activist and a recovering alcoholic. She is a mixed-raced woman, the daughter of a white Scottish Roman Catholic woman and a Black Church of England man. When she was two, her parents separated and Sabrina, her mother and her white-presenting younger sister moved to a small market town where no one looked like her. From as young as she can remember, she was the subject of verbal and physical racist abuse.

Beard's stunning debut is an epistolary novel written from 15-year-old Tess DeNunzio to her little sister Zoe. After Zoe's accidental death on September 11, 2001, a day so many others died, Tess' family is numbed by their personal tragedy. Already acutely aware of her odd place in a home where her mother and stepfather now have children of their own, Tess begins her letter as a means of figuring out her own life, from her two-hour-a-day hair and makeup ritual to her complicity in Zoe's death.

At age fourteen, Laura Delano saw her first psychiatrist who immediately diagnosed her with bipolar disorder and started her on a mood stabilizer and antidepressant. At school, Delano was elected the class president and earned straight-As and a national squash ranking; at home, she unleashed all the rage and despair she felt, lashing out at her family and locking herself in her bedroom, obsessing over death. Delano’s initial diagnosis marked the beginning of a life-altering saga

Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man ended on a harrowing note. Suffering from severe depression after her 18 months living disguised as a man, Vincent felt she was a danger to herself. On the advice of her psychologist she committed herself to a mental institution.

Serial homicide. Stalking. Arson. Gang crime. Who are the people behind these acts of terrible violence? What are their stories? And what is it like to sit opposite them? Dr Gwen Adshead is one of Britain's leading forensic psychiatrists, and she has spent 30 years providing therapy inside secure hospitals and prisons. Whatever her patient's crime, she aims to help them to better know their minds by helping them to articulate their life experience.

The New York Times best-selling author blends a pitch-perfect childlike voice with keen adult observation as she shares her heartrending, groundbreaking insider's look into the fascinating and frightening world of childhood bipolar disorder.