Mental Health Memoir

When her husband, Alan, is injured in a speedboat accident, Cathy Crimmins reluctantly assumes the role of caregiver and learns to cope with the person he has become. No longer the man who loved obscure Japanese cinema and wry humor, Crimmins’ husband has emerged from the accident a childlike and unpredictable replica of his former self with a short attention span and a penchant for inane cartoons. Where Is the Mango Princess? is a breathtaking account that explores the very nature of personality - and the complexities of the heart.

In my session with Imogen, the words were still not coming. I had to move past my own frustration and relax. But it is very hard to relax when you are looking into the eyes of a mute little girl who wants to be dead. You don't want to relax; you want to pull her into your arms, hold her, and then shake her until she tells you why. You long to say, "Why do you want to die? You're twelve years old."

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.

Abhinav Bindra once shot 100 out of 100 in practice six times in a row and walked out of the range unhappy. He is a perfectionist who once soled his shoes with rubber from Ferrari tyres because he thought it would help. He would wake up at 3:00 a.m. to practise at his range at home if an idea suddenly struck him. It is from such obsession that greatness arrives.

Zack McDermott, a 26-year-old Brooklyn public defender, woke up one morning convinced he was being filmed, Truman Show-style, as part of an audition for a TV pilot. This was it - his big dreams were finally coming true. Every passerby was an actor; every car would magically stop for him; everything he saw was a cue from "The Producer" to help inspire the performance of a lifetime. After a manic spree around Manhattan, Zack, who is bipolar, was arrested on a subway platform and admitted to Bellevue Hospital.

Sandra Allen did not know their uncle Bob very well. As a child, Sandy had been told Bob was “crazy”, that he had spent time in mental hospitals while growing up in Berkeley in the '60s and '70s. But Bob had lived a hermetic life in a remote part of California for longer than Sandy had been alive, and what little Sandy knew of him came from rare family reunions or odd, infrequent phone calls. Then in 2009, Bob mailed Sandy his autobiography.

Schizoetry by definition means: a literary work fusing poetry with the mind of a schizophrenic. This is a genre that I created. All my work revolves around the life and times of a paranoid schizophrenic. My work is very educational and inspiring to those in the system of mental health as well as those outside of the system. It gives insight as to how we think, feel, perceive, and process information.

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.

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.

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 his impoverished childhood in a working-class English family, to his determination to educate himself at any cost, to the serious ill health that dominated his 20s and 30s, his complicated marriages, and love affair with socialism, the first 40 years of H. G. Wells' extraordinary life would set him on a path to become one of the world's most influential writers. In this remarkable, empathetic biography, Claire Tomalin paints a fascinating portrait of a man like no other.

The author describes in detail all the insanity, disturbing behaviors, oppressive symptoms, and various feeling associated with the mental battles within her own mind. The author suffers from clinical depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, and borderline personality disorder. She struggles with suicidal thoughts and attempts, self-mutilating behaviors, mania, paranoia, anxiety, and psychosis with intense hallucinations of all five of her senses, and multiple delusions, including the belief that she is the "second-coming of Christ".

Am I an accident? Why did I have to go through all of this pain? What is the purpose of my life? These are just a few questions asked and answered by international author, public speaker and minister, D'Andre J. Lacy in his book, Out of the Ashes: Finding the Purpose In Your Pain.

Stacy Pershall grew up as an overly intelligent, depressed, deeply strange girl in Prairie Grove, Arkansas, population 1,000. From her days as a 13-year-old Jesus freak through her eventual diagnosis of bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder, this spirited memoir chronicles Pershall's journey through hell and her struggle with the mental health care system.

In the Shadow of Fame, by the daughter of world-renowned psychoanalyst and theorist Erik Erikson, is the intimate story of her struggle to come to terms with her father's fame and to develop a sense of self in a family, and world, in which being famous is the very definition of being a worthwhile human being. And, while her story is unique in its personal details, it is also a description of the struggle faced by all of us in a modern world.

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.

Why does an international footballer with the World at his feet decide to take his own life? On November 10, 2009, the German national goalkeeper Robert Enke stepped in front of a passing train. He was 32 years old. Viewed from the outside, Enke had it all. Here was a professional goalkeeper who had played for a string of Europe's top clubs, including Jose Mourinho's Benfica and Louis Van Gaal's Barcelona. Enke was destined to be his country's first choice for years. But beneath the veneer of success lay a darker story.

After 33 seasons managing in Major League Baseball, Tony La Russa thought he had seen it all - that is, until the 2011 Cardinals. Down ten and a half games with little more than a month to play, the Cardinals had long been ruled out as serious postseason contenders. Yet in the face of those steep odds, this team mounted one of the most dramatic and impressive comebacks in baseball history, making the playoffs on the night of the final game of the season and going on to win the World Series despite being down to their last strike - twice.

In an idyllic Los Angeles neighborhood, where generations enjoy deep roots in old homes, the O’Rourke family fits right in. Miriam and Craig are both artists and their four children carry on the legacy. When their teenage son, Nick, is diagnosed with schizophrenia, a tumultuous decade ensues in which the family careens off the conventional course. Like the 10 Biblical plagues, they are hit by one catastrophe after another: violence, evictions, arrests, a suicide attempt, a near-drowning - even cancer and a brain tumor - play against the backdrop of a wild teenage bacchanal.

Baynard Woods thought he had escaped the backwards ways of the South Carolina he grew up in, a world defined by country music, NASCAR, and the confederacy. He’d fled the South long ago, transforming himself into a politically left-leaning writer and educator. Then he was accused of discriminating against a Black student at a local university. How could I be racist? he wondered. Whiteness was a problem, but it wasn’t really his problem. He taught at a majority Black school and wrote essays about education and Civil Rights.