Mental Illness Memoirs

With aspirations of being a successful lawyer, Jonathan embarks on a path to make his dreams come true, but is ultimately, unable to do so due to his schizoaffective disorder. In this candid and unflinching memoir, Jonathan reveals his story in all its rawness: the ups, the downs, the wins, the losses, the highs and the darkest of lows.

Following Rachel’s fatal overdose years later, her mother, Carolyn DiPasquale, stumbles upon her daughter’s diaries. Shattered, she searches for answers, retracing her steps to figure out how parents and doctors missed three major mental illnesses.

From New York Times best-selling author, Emmy award-winning broadcast journalist, and leading Alzheimer's advocate Meryl Comer comes a profoundly intimate account of her husband's battle with Alzheimer's disease, one of today's most pressing - and least understood - health epidemics.

A marriage with an imperfect love story goes tragically wrong one summer in a small college town in Virginia, and the husband is left picking up the pieces of pain and regret. How did it end in suicide instead of divorce? What he discovers six months later is both heartbreaking and astonishing.

This book explains what bipolar disorder is, outlines medications that work to combat it, describes Bridget's journey with God, and talks about how the stigma of mental illness has been somewhat alleviated, but there is still work to be done.

El autor de este libro pasó de trabajar en el mundo editorial, dar clases de interpretación actoral y estar bien considerado, a ser bipolar, con vida de bipolar, con pensión de bipolar. Y ser mirado y tratado como bipolar; en algunos casos con desconfianza, en otros con paternalismo y casi siempre con recelo.

From the New York Times best-selling author of The Monopolists, the incredible story of Olympic sailor Kevin Hall and the psychiatric syndrome that makes him believe he stars in a television show of his life.

She’s Not Herself is a journey to make sense of the effects of multigenerational traumas. Shapiro is ultimately able to forgive (without forgetting) those who left her to fend for herself - and to provide listeners with the wisdom of a seasoned psychotherapist who has examined human vulnerability in its many disguises and has moved through it all with dignity and hope. The result is a memoir of love, loss, loyalty, and healing

The last place Lisa Eley expects to be is a despondent patient in a psychiatric hospital on suicide watch fighting for her life. As an African American single parent from northwest Baltimore, Lisa knows knock-down, drawn-out hardships and resilient comebacks very well. She rises above every land mine life sets, detonating each with her quiet will and unyielding determination to defeat every adversity in her path. Faith and fate lead her to a new job with a leading agency, a pivotal success leap she thinks. What happens next will have this mild-mannered, upstanding citizen and worshiping Christian plot murder.

By the time native Sicilian Mariagrazia Buttitta turned 26, she’d planned out the perfect life. After finishing her residency in Buongiorno Medical School, she’d be primed for a job at the prestigious Roma Hospital, the first step toward becoming an Italian Dr. Oz. Instead, she wakes up to discover a medical diagnosis that leaves her almost completely blind. Her family, frustrated and desperate, seeks medical aid in the US, but it comes with a steep price.

Charismatic, beautiful Sally Flynn was the center of her daughters' imaginations, particularly Laura's. Without warning, life as they knew it changed as paranoid schizophrenia overtook Sally. Whether it was accusing Laura’s father of trying to win her over to the side of Satan, or buying only certain products that were evil-free, glimmers of her mother’s future paranoia grew brighter as Laura’s early years passed. Once her husband left the family and filed for divorce, Sally’s symptoms bloomed in earnest, and the three girls united in flights of fancy of the sort their mother had taught them in order to deflect danger.

Kevin Sampsell’s A Common Pornography is a memoir, told in vignettes, that captures the history of one dysfunctional American family. An extension of a 2003 "memory experiment" of the same name, A Common Pornography weaves recollections of small-town youth with darker threads from his family’s story, including incest, madness, betrayal, and death. A regular contributor to Dave Egger’s The Believer and McSweeney’s, Sampsell has written "the kind of book where you want to thank the author for helping you feel less alone with being alive" (Jonathan Ames, author of Wake Up, Sir! and The Double Life Is Twice as Good).

Nearly one in every five Americans deals with mental illness in a given year, and the rates are climbing. Among physicians, the rate is even higher as the time spent in medical training significantly increases the risk of poor mental health. None of us is fully immune from the ravages of mental health problems. This book is about the fallibility of us all, including the doctors who are supposed to care for us. It is about the fine line of illness and normal emotion and about how to change the norms of medical practice in light of human weakness.

The son of a Salvadoran mother and Scotch Irish mechanic father, Marcos spent much of his life trying to break away from his Southern Appalachian past and the trauma experienced there and striving to get closer to his Salvadoran heritage. His journey includes steeping himself in the Spanish language and Latin American literature, especially the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez; a stint in Nicaragua with Witness for Peace, followed by missionary work in Guatemala; and social-justice work with Mexican migrant farmworkers in Alabama.

My memoir begins at birth, where I almost died, and ends with my suicide attempt at the age of 31. I am grateful that I survived. Somewhere in the aftermath, an old self perished, along with all past trauma. I went through a rebirth and was finally ready to share that part of my story which I had kept hidden and secret from the world. My journey covered mental illness, drug and alcohol addiction, prescription medication abuse, suicide, drug overdose, coma recovery, military base life, house repossession, facing homelessness, gang crime, domestic abuse, divorce, and much more.

In this powerful memoir, Susan Ralphe employs sharp storytelling skills honed over a long newspaper reporting career to tell her own story of long-term, heart-wrenching bipolar madness. She recounts soaring accomplishments alternating with black periods of tenseness, brain freeze, and despair.

This is the moving yet deeply disturbing story of a middle-aged mother and a teenaged daughter torn apart by the sudden onset of the mother’s insanity. It details the severe paranoia and absurd delusions that began to control my mother’s behavior. It follows her transformation from loving parent to violent psychotic and my transformation from obedient daughter to terrified runaway. And it depicts the overwhelming revelatory moment when I finally learned she had died - six years before.

It was the spring of 1989. I was 16 years old, a junior in high school and an honors student. I had what every teenager wants: a stable family, a nice home in the suburbs, a great group of friends, big plans for my future, and no reason to believe that any of that would ever change. Then came my mother's psychosis.

This collection of poetry, memoirs, and stories of short fiction presents to the listener such themes as depression, suicide, hopelessness, grief, loss, love, mental illness, and abuse both emotional and physical experienced by the writers or someone close to them. This collection serves to demonstrate that hiding behind shame or fear rather than sharing emotional pain as the authors in these works do is tantamount to putting on a mask; wearing a person suit.

This is my life story. This is what mental illness looks like. This is how it breathes. A real life account of a man that is going through mental illness from the state of Ohio.