Mental Illness Disorders

Attention Deficit Disorder, the most common learning and behavioral problem among children, also affects millions of adult Americans, more of which are being diagnosed with this potentially disabling condition every day.

We are in the midst of a mental health crisis. An estimated one in five American adults suffer from some form of mental illness. Despite the billions of dollars spent in pharmaceutical research and the rising popularity of antidepressant drugs, we are more depressed and anxious than ever before. What if we’re looking for solutions in the wrong places? What if instead of treating mental illness with prescriptions and medication, we changed what we eat and how we feed our brains?

Good health doesn’t have to be complicated. Sleeping, hydrating, and breathing are fundamental to life, and making simple adjustments to the way we perform these basic functions can have an extraordinary impact on our health and wellbeing. In Sleep Drink Breathe, bestselling author Dr. Michael Breus shares the most recent science on these biobehaviors and inspiring patient stories that are the basis for his innovative strategy for optimizing your sleep, hydration, and breathing habits.

Kelly Williams Brown had 700 bad days. Her marriage collapsed, she broke three limbs in separate and unrelated incidents, her father was diagnosed with cancer, and she fell into a deep depression that ended in what could delicately be referred to as a “rest cure” at an inpatient facility. Before that, she had several very good years: She wrote a best-selling book, spoke at NASA, had a beautiful wedding, and inspired hundreds of thousands of readers to live as grown-ups in an often-screwed-up world, though these accomplishments mostly just made her feel fraudulent.

Dreaming is one of the most underappreciated functions of the human brain, yet our very survival as a species depends on it. In This Is Why You Dream, dual-trained neuroscientist and neurosurgeon Dr. Rahul Jandial explores the landscape of our subconscious, tracing the latest cutting-edge dream research and brain science to show why humans have retained the ability to dream across millennia, and how we can now harness its wondrous powers to improve our sleeping and waking lives.

This “incredibly captivating” (Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies) portrait of schizophrenia, the most malignant and mysterious mental illness, by renowned psychiatrist Jeffrey Lieberman, interweaves cultural and scientific history with dramatic patient profiles and clinical experiences to impart a revolutionary message of hope. For the first time in history, we can effectively treat schizophrenia, limiting its disabling effects—and we’re on the verge of being able to prevent the disease’s onset entirely.

Though many of us can point to patterns of brokenness in our lives, we don't know why they're there. No matter how hard we work, we can't seem to outrun the very things that break our hearts. That's because our everyday setbacks are rooted in our unaddressed wounds. Guided by seminary-trained licensed trauma therapist Kobe Campbell, Why Am I Like This? will help you develop courage as you dare to turn your heart toward your brokenness, uncover uncomfortable truths, and learn how to invite God into your past and present pain.

It began in Los Angeles in 1993, when Jaime Lowe was just 16. She stopped sleeping and eating and began to hallucinate - demonically cackling Muppets, faces lurking in windows, Michael Jackson delivering messages from the Neverland Underground. Lowe wrote manifestos and math equations in her diary and drew infographics on her bedroom wall. Eventually hospitalized and diagnosed as bipolar, she was prescribed a medication that came in the form of three pink pills - lithium.

In this fully updated fourth edition, Dr. Marc Weissbluth, one of the country's leading pediatricians, overhauls his groundbreaking approach to solving and preventing your children's sleep problems, from infancy through adolescence. In Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, he explains with authority and reassurance his step-by-step regime for instituting beneficial habits within the framework of your child's natural sleep cycles.

Susan Doherty's groundbreaking book brings us a population of lost souls, ill-served by society, feared, shunted from locked wards to rooming houses to the streets to jail and back again. For the past ten years, some of the people who cycle in and out of the severely ill wards of the Douglas Institute in Montreal have found a friend in Susan, who volunteers on the ward, and then follows her friends out into the world as they struggle to get through their days. With their full cooperation, she brings us their stories, which challenge the ways we think about people with mental illness.

Professor of psychiatry Elyn R. Saks writes about her struggle with schizophrenia in this unflinching account of her mental illness. In The Center Cannot Hold, Saks draws readers into a nightmare world of medications, a misguided health-care system, and social stigmas. But she would not be defeated. With a strength and force of will that most can only imagine, Saks reclaimed her life and went on to achieve great success.

The emotional trauma we suffer as children not only shapes our emotional lives as adults but also affects our physical health and overall well-being. Scientists now know on a biochemical level exactly how parents' chronic fights, divorce, death in the family, being bullied or hazed, and growing up with a hypercritical, alcoholic, or mentally ill parent can leave permanent, physical "fingerprints" on our brains.

Vince Granata remembers standing in front of his suburban home in Connecticut the day his mother and father returned from the hospital with his three new siblings in tow. He had just finished scrawling their names in orange chalk on the driveway: Christopher, Timothy, and Elizabeth. Twenty-three years later, Vince was a thousand miles away when he received the news that would change his life - his younger brother, Tim, propelled by unchecked schizophrenia, had killed their mother in their childhood home.

We've all experienced brain fog - misplaced keys, forgotten facts, a general feeling that you're just feeling off today. And many of us will experience that "fog" manifesting as something more permanent - either in ourselves or our loved ones. No matter what your current brain health state may be, You Can Fix Your Brain will enable and empower you to take concrete steps that will make an immediate difference in your brain’s vitality, clarity, and energy. Your memory will improve, fogginess will disappear, you’ll be less tired all the time, and much more.

Do you find yourself lying awake at night, ruminating about the events of the day? Do you toss and turn, worrying about what you have to do in the morning or what you did earlier in the day? If so, you are not alone. In fact, insomnia is the most common sleep disorder faced by the general population today.

Lia and Cassie are best friends, wintergirls frozen in fragile bodies, competitors in a deadly contest to see who can be the thinnest. But then Cassie suffers the ultimate loss - her life - and Lia is left behind, haunted by her friend's memory and racked with guilt for not being able to help save her.

As an award-winning stuntwoman, Kimberly Shannon Murphy was intimate with pain. For years, she propelled her body through dangerous spaces—medicating the trauma of her childhood sexual abuse with the adrenaline rush that came from pushing herself to the absolute limit. But as Kimberly learned, no matter how much you suppress your past, it always catches up with you.

In this compassionate and empowering book, noted psychologists Gordon J. G. Asmundson and Steven Taylor provide simple and accurate self-tests designed to help you understand health anxiety and the role it might be playing in how you feel. Concrete examples and helpful exercises show you how to change thought and behavior patterns that contribute to the aches, pains, and anxiety you're experiencing. The authors also explain how to involve friends and family - and when to seek professional help - as you learn to stay well without worry.

The Close sisters are descended from very prominent and wealthy ancestors. When the Close sisters were very young, their parents joined a cult called the MRA, or Moral Rearmament. The family was suddenly uprooted to a cult school in Switzerland and, ultimately, to the Belgian Congo where their father became a surgeon in the war-ravaged republic, and ultimately the personal physician to President Mobutu.

Historians have long puzzled over the apparent mental instability of great and terrible leaders alike: Napoleon, Lincoln, Churchill, Hitler, and others. In A First-Rate Madness, Nassir Ghaemi, director of the Mood Disorders Program at Tufts Medical Center, offers a myth-shattering exploration of the powerful connections between mental illness and leadership and sets forth a controversial, compelling thesis: The very qualities that mark those with mood disorders also make for the best leaders in times of crisis.