Mental Health Memoir

I was you. I was once afraid, anxious, confused and lost. I was crippled with panic attacks, trapped by agoraphobia, and riddled with constant anxiety. I almost lost everything important in my life as my world became smaller and smaller. This is the story of my journey through anxiety, panic disorder, and agoraphobia. The good, the bad, and the ugly of panic attacks, anxiety symptoms, irrational and obsessive thoughts, and being afraid to leave my house or be left alone.

In his early 20s, Mindy Greiling's son, Jim, was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder after experiencing delusions that demanded he kill his mother. At the time, and for more than a decade after, Greiling was a Minnesota state legislator who struggled, along with her husband, to navigate and improve the state's inadequate mental health system. Fix What You Can is an illuminating and frank account of caring for a person with a mental illness, told by a parent and advocate.

Families are riddled with untold secrets. But Stephen Hinshaw never imagined that a profound secret was kept under lock and key for 18 years within his family - that his father's mysterious absences, for months at a time, resulted from serious mental illness and involuntary hospitalizations. From the moment his father revealed the truth, during Hinshaw's first spring break from college, he knew his life would change forever.

It was an ordinary day in 2016. In Gatwick Airport, Jonathan and his wife, Anna, were having breakfast with their two little children while waiting for their flight to be called. And then it happened, a familiar sensation that Jonathan hadn't had for decades: an out-of-body experience that transported him to another place, the safe place he used to escape to in his mind when he was a boy.

In ADHD and Me, he tells about the next 12 years as he learns to live with both the good and bad sides of life with ADHD. Blake's memoir offers, for the first time, a young person's account of what it's like to live and grow up with this common condition. Join Blake as he foils bullies, confronts unfair teachers, struggles with distraction and disorganization on exams, and goes sailing out-of-bounds and ends up with a boatload of spiders.

His name was Kevin but his keepers called him Zoo Boy. He didn't talk. He hid under tables and surrounded himself with a cage of chairs. He hadn't been out of the building in the four years since he'd come in. He was afraid of water and wouldn't take a shower. He was afraid to be naked, to change his clothes. He was nearly 16. Desperate to see change in the boy, the staff of Kevin's adolescent treatment center hired Hayden. As Hayden read to him and encouraged him to read, crawling down into his cage of chairs with him, Kevin talked.

Menopause hit Darcey Steinke hard. First came hot flashes. Then insomnia. Then depression. As she struggled to understand what was happening to her, she slammed up against a culture of silence and sexism. Some books promoted hormone replacement therapy. Others encouraged accepting the coming crone. Beyond that, there was little that offered a path to understanding menopause in a complex, spiritual, and intellectually engaged way.

Over the past two decades, we have started talking more about common mental health conditions like depression and anxiety. But complex conditions like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and psychosis have been left behind, as have many of the people who live with these conditions or who care for them. Part memoir, part deep-dive investigation, The One Thing We've Never Spoken About is filled with rage at how our nation's public discourse, emergency services and healthcare systems continue to fail so many people.

In this audiobook is a unique, never-before-published look at the investigations undertaken to stop the depredations of America's most infamous serial killer, Ted Bundy. Presented here in an easy-to-follow chronology are the raw, unedited and most fascinating official case files as they appeared to the detectives from the Pacific Northwest to the Rocky Mountains to Florida.

Compelling listening for anyone seeking the courage to make more conscious choices and live fully awake, The Necktie and the Jaguar is a memoir with thought-provoking questions that encourage self-exploration. Author Carl Greer - businessman, philanthropist, and retired Jungian analyst and clinical psychologist - offers an illuminating road map to individuation and personal transformation. His memoir is an inspirational testament to the power of self-discovery. As Carl Greer learned, you don’t have to feel trapped in a story someone else has written for you.

Sam Delaney was Jack the Lad. He was confident, loud and funny; an absolute legend, to be honest. Or at least that was what he pretended to be. But when he reached his thirties, work, relationships and fatherhood started to take their toll. Like so many blokes who seemed to be totally fine, he often felt like a complete failure whose life was out of control; anxiety and depression had secretly plagued him for years. Turning to drink and drugs only made things worse.

Critically acclaimed author of We Are the Ants - described as having "hints of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five" (School Library Journal) - opens up about what led to an attempted suicide in his teens, and his path back from the experience.

A prize-winning journalist with a background in neuroscience, Helen Thomson spent years tracking down people who live with the world's most extraordinary neurological disorders - like a man who tried to break his back because his legs no longer felt like his own, and another who believed that he was dead for nine years. Not content to simply read about these cases on paper, Thomson reached out to 10 people with these afflictions, and they agreed to tell her their stories.

When you've experienced trauma and conventional treatments have failed, where do you turn? After unsuccessfully trying traditional therapy, renowned author and social researcher Rebecca Huntley chose an unconventional path to healing: MDMA. Sassafras is the story of a woman determined to confront her traumatic past head on. In doing so she discovered something that could be of great benefit to us all.

Secrets of a Good Girl pulls back the curtain on an erotic world hiding in plain sight - a world where women are in control. In this erotic memoir, listeners will follow the real journey of “Josie”, as she goes behind closed doors into European sex clubs, aboard private yachts, and to exclusive erotic enclaves around the world.

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.

A short memoir packed with firsthand experience about a topic rarely discussed from the survivor's perspective, Beauty for Ashes: Memoir of a Traumatic Brain Injury Survivor shares my horrors and triumphs after sustaining a traumatic brain injury from a motor vehicle accident during the most promising part of my life. My goal is to support other trauma survivors, and those close to them, by discussing the ugly truths one can face with an injury that cannot be seen, yet is often misunderstood and underestimated.

With those chilling words, the author’s world was shattered. What began as an unimaginable tragedy unraveled into a devastating story of mental illness, family bonds, and the fragile line between love and fear. In this gripping true crime memoir, the author takes listeners inside the courtroom where shocking revelations exposed the depth of his sister’s mental unraveling. Through raw and unflinching honesty, he reflects on the haunting events that led to that fateful day and the lasting impact on those left behind.

Some serial killers seem surreal, as if it's almost impossible to believe that an individual could do such horrific crimes. The Beast of Birkenshaw, a.k.a. Peter Manuel, was such a man.

Imagine losing your grip on reality and plunging into a nightmarish yet fantastical realm of schizophrenia. This memoir is one Harvard grad's account of several psychotic episodes he's endured over the years. A constant pause-resister, the adrenaline doses keep coming from start to finish. These vivid accounts of psychoses put the listeners in a front-row seat of some of the spectacular recesses of human imagination - only the listener has the option to check out at any time.