Mental Health Memoir

Searching for answers everywhere has led you to believe your beloved child might have schizophrenia. You can only find horror stories on the illness, that is when you’re able to understand the lengthy and confusing medical terminology at all.

Bestselling author and psychologist Tony Bates has spent his career seeking to understand the lives of others. Here he turns his therapeutic eye on himself and describes the events and people in his own life that have made him the insightful thinker and teacher that he is today. He recalls traumatic events in his childhood that reverberated throughout his life and how, with therapy and time, he was eventually able to heal. He recounts the stories of the patients that affected him most deeply and informed both the direction of his work and his philosophy as a psychologist.

Everything Is an Emergency is about all the self-destructive stories someone tells himself, over and over, until they start to seem true. In images surreal, witty, and confessional, Jason shows us that OCD can be funny, even when it feels like it’s ruining your life.

Does peaking in high school ruin you for life? Was Miley Cyrus right, is it all about the climb (when it comes to building a career?) And what - scientifically - is the best way to mend a broken heart? Comedian Suzi Ruffell is considering life's big questions. In this brutally honest, funny, and often moving memoir, Suzi winningly tells her life story, and asks a host of experts to answer the tricky questions it prompts along the way. Diamond life advice comes from the likes of Elizabeth Day, Dolly Alderton, Charlene Douglas, Laura Bates, Dr Kirren Schnack, and more.

Secrets of a Crazy Mental Health Counselor is a guide, and a self-help, motivational, and purely inspirational book. It tells a story about life issues and how to overcome all of the traps that have been set up to make you fail. It was written for mental health counselors, workers, women, teenagers, entrepreneurs, and anybody struggling with life each day.

Amy Jo Burns grew up in Mercury, Pennsylvania, an industrial town humbled by the steel collapse of the 1980s. Instead of the construction booms and twelve-hour shifts her parents’ generation had known, the Mercury Amy Jo knew was marred by empty houses, old strip mines, and vacant lots. The year Burns turned ten, this sleepy town suddenly woke up. Howard Lotte, its beloved piano teacher, was accused of sexually assaulting his female students.

In February of 1973, Nancy Weber put an ad in the Village Voice offering to trade places with another woman, a stranger, for a month. In hopes of better understanding what was fixed and final in each person - and what was invented, and therefore might be reinvented - they would use each other's names, live in each other's homes, love each other's loves, and do each other's work.

One night in 2009, Tanya Frank finds her nineteen-year-old son, Zach—gentle and full of promise—in the grip of what the psychiatrists would label a psychotic break. Suddenly and inexplicably, Tanya is thrown into a parallel universe: Zach's world, where the phones are bugged, his friends have joined the Mafia, and helicopters are spying on his family.

Decades of mental illness has enabled me to reason with paranoia. Making associations with abstract reasoning to explain my feelings that I don't understand helps to keep me at ease

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.

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.

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.

“Pat, we need to kill the dog.” When a sudden mental illness struck his wife, Patrick Dylan found himself living with an eerie stranger. Scared and unprepared, he began a desperate battle to protect her from a mysterious disease, shelter their children from her bizarre behavior, and recover the woman he loved. Within weeks, she had been admitted to the emergency room, the hospital, and the local crisis facility, but none of the experts could provide an answer. As her illness eluded diagnosis, the family’s struggle was only beginning.

When Pepper Stetler was told that her daughter who has Down Syndrome would be regularly required to take IQ tests to secure support in school, she asked a simple question: why? In questioning the authority and relevance of the test, Stetler sets herself on a winding investigation into how the IQ test came to be the irrefutable standard for measuring intelligence. The unsettling history causes Stetler to wonder what influence this test will have over her daughter's future and whether Louisa should be taking it at all.

The journey of a man, father, and sailor, Anchored in Resilience: Overcoming Adversity through Mental Health Awareness is the true story of adventures, lessons, and growth as seen through the eyes of a boy looking for love, a young man looking for answers, and an adult yearning to inspire. Author and Navy veteran Amaury Ponciano shares vulnerable truths, revelations, and experiences from over twenty years of Naval service. Anchored in Resilience is a memoir of healing—because healing starts with understanding our wounds.

Moms in Medicine: Navigating Mental Health Challenges is a heartfelt and empowering guide that delves into the unique challenges faced by mothers who work in the medical field. Written by Sarah El Yaman, a seasoned physician, and mother herself, this book offers invaluable insights, practical advice, and real-life examples to support doctor moms in balancing their careers with motherhood.

On June 9, 2008, the butchered body of Travis Alexander was found in his Mesa, Arizona, home. The grisly nature of his death made instant headlines: With 29 knife wounds, his throat slit, and a gunshot to the head, Travis was left to die. The prime suspect in the case was Alexander's ex-girlfriend, the attractive and soft-spoken Jodi Arias. Though Arias initially said that she was nowhere near the scene of crime, little about this case was as it seemed, and before long she had been caught lying to police. As the investigation progressed, her lies evolved multiple times before finally resting on an appalling claim: She had killed Travis in self-defense.

A Simon & Schuster audiobook. Simon & Schuster has a great book for every listener.

The memoir presents a raw and personal account of Tyler Ellicott's journey, detailing his triumphs over setbacks that were not only physical but mental as well as providing listeners with an intimate look at his life and aspirations.

Mental illness can get ugly even if you're considered pretty. This model, actress, social media maven, and mental health warrior has tried it all—amid a world of flashing lights, fame, sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll, Hugh Hefner, family drama, and debilitating mental illness. Follow Autumn down the rabbit hole of mental health struggles in Hollywood—and out the seldom-discussed "other side". Because when the all-consuming mental illness storm has settled; who will you be without constant dysfunction, and what new challenges will you face?