Mental Illness Disorders

Despite all her best efforts to break the cycle of catastrophic, destructive patterns of mental illness, Anna Berry found herself at the end of her rope - unemployed, penniless, homeless, and in the throes of a psychotic episode that threatened to destroy her life. Alone and unwell, she manages to find her grip on life, seeks the help she needs, and embarks on a life and career that illustrate that mental illness does not have to be ruinous.

An intimate, compassionate, and expansive portrait of Borderline Personality Disorder that rejects the conventional wisdom that this condition is untreatable, told by a psychologist who specializes in BPD....

Growing up the good girl in an Irish American family full of drinkers and terrible sleepers, Kathleen Frazier was 12 when her seemingly innocent sleepwalking turned dangerous. Over the next few years, she was a popular A+ student by day, the star of her high school musical. At night she both longed for and dreaded sleep. Frazier moved to Manhattan in the 1980s, hoping for a life in the theater but getting a run of sleepwalking performances instead.

In The Sleep Revolution, Arianna explores all the latest science on what exactly is going on while we sleep and dream. She takes on the sleeping pill industry, and all the ways our addiction to technology disrupts our sleep. She also offers a range of recommendations and tips from leading scientists on how we can get better and more restorative sleep, and harness its incredible power.

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.

What if you could activate or improve your body’s natural healing thanks to a few simple physical exercises? Just imagine those exercises reducing your body’s inflammation, anxiety, or chronic illness. How could it be possible? The Vagus Nerve partially controls our heart and other internal organs as well, insulin signaling, emotions like orgasms and other physical functions. Knowing exactly and stimulating in the right way this important nerve can bring lots of benefits on various areas.

Public awareness of mental illness has been transformed in recent years, but our understanding of how to define it has yet to catch up. Too often, psychiatric disorders are confused with the inherent stresses and challenges of human experience. A narrative has taken hold that a mental health crisis has been building among young people.

While on a research trip in Peru, science journalist Alice Robb became hooked on lucid dreaming - the uncanny phenomenon in which a sleeping person can realize that they're dreaming and even control the dreamed experience. Finding these forays both puzzling and exhilarating, Robb dug deeper into the science of dreams at an extremely opportune moment: just as researchers began to understand why dreams exist. They aren't just random events; they have clear purposes. They help us learn and even overcome psychic trauma.

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.

Richard Carlson Jr. was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia when he was 21 years of age. His illness first manifested when he was an early adolescent. Modern psychiatry greatly failed Richard for over a decade. Then, after an incident involving the police, he truly understood that his diagnosis was real, and finally began the long process of recovery. Over 10 years later, his life is greatly improved. In the course of his treatment, Richard also recovered from depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and lethargy.

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.

Break the cycle of anxious thinking and rumination that are at the root of insomnia. In this much-needed guide, a trained mindfulness expert teams up with a behavioral sleep specialist to present evidence-based meditations in an innovative four-week protocol clinically demonstrated to address the emotional stresses and anxieties that lie at the root of sleep issues. Following this guide, listeners will learn to unwind their mind, relax their body, feel less tense, and finally get the sleep they need.

Poor sleep is one of the most common health problems and can leave you feeling exhausted, stressed and run-down. While prescribed medications and over-the-counter remedies rarely offer lasting benefits, cognitive behavioural therapy can help enormously and is the treatment of choice for insomnia.

Leading medical innovator Kenneth Bock, MD, has helped change the lives of more than 1,000 children, and in this important book he offers help to children everywhere. This is the book that finally puts hope within reach. Doctors have generally overlooked the connections among the 4-A disorders, despite their concurrent rise and the presence of many medical clues.

“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.

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.

Anxiety is a very serious issue and especially the fear of illness is a real ordeal for many sufferers. But fear is also a feeling that every human being carries within him or her, which is vital or essential for survival and is stronger or weaker in each person depending on their personality. Fear drives, inspires, mobilizes one's own forces, leads to success, but can also make you sick - so sick that life becomes hell. Hypochondria - as the fear of illness is specifically called - is a phenomenon of completely exaggerated fears that can push sufferers to their limits.

The SMART (Sensory Motor Arousal Regulation Treatment) program addresses three key processes that can be derailed by developmental trauma—somatic regulation, trauma processing, and attachment-building—and uses movement and sensation to target the neurological structures that support emotional and behavioral regulation.

More than one third of adults suffer from insomnia or some other kind of sleep disorder. With time, a lack of sleep lowers our resilience and impacts our health as well as our performance in all areas of life. Restoring hope to the sleepless, psychologist Philip Carr-Gomm reveals how we can improve our sleep naturally. A fast and easy-to-follow six-step program to help you sleep better, The Gift of the Night combines knowledge from sleep science and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) with techniques drawn from spiritual traditions and insights from the emerging field of psychedelic therapy.

Drawing on her 25-plus years of experience in the assessment and treatment of common sleep problems in children, Dr. Jodi A. Mindell provides tips and techniques, the answers to commonly asked questions, and case studies and quotes from parents who have successfully solved their children's sleep problems. Unlike other books on the subject, Dr. Mindell also offers practical tips on bedtime, rather than middle-of-the-night-sleep training, and shows how all members of the family can cope with the stresses associated with teaching a child to sleep.