Mental Illness

The brain remains a mystery to medical research and science when it comes to chronic illness. Measuring deficits of the brain doesn't equate to knowing what's really wrong or what to do about it. Where can you turn to get answers and finally find healing? In Brain Saver Protocols, Cleanses, and Recipes, Anthony William, the Medical Medium, provides compassionate, life-altering guidance to help you understand and heal from a vast range of brain symptoms, diseases, and disorders, including anxiety, autism, and addiction; tumors, Parkinson's, and ALS; and many more.

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.

At 15, Elizabeth Gilpin was an honor student, a state-ranked swimmer, and a rising soccer star, but behind closed doors, her undiagnosed depression was wreaking havoc on her life. Growing angrier by the day, she began skipping practices and drinking to excess. At a loss, her parents turned to an educational consultant who suggested Elizabeth be enrolled in a behavioral modification program. That recommendation would change her life forever.

How the Brain Lost Its Mind tells the rich and compelling story of two confounding ailments, syphilis and hysteria, and the extraordinary efforts to confront their effects on mental life. How does the mind work? Where does madness lie, in the brain or in the mind? How should it be treated?

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.

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?

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.

As Jenny Lawson’s hundreds of thousands of fans know, she suffers from depression. In Broken (in the Best Possible Way), Jenny brings listeners along on her mental and physical health journey, offering heartbreaking and hilarious anecdotes along the way. With people experiencing anxiety and depression now more than ever, Jenny humanizes what we all face in an all-too-real way, reassuring us that we’re not alone and making us laugh while doing it.

America has made mental illness a crime. Jails in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago each house more people with mental illnesses than any hospital. In this revelatory book, journalist Alisa Roth goes deep inside the criminal justice system to tell how and why it has become a warehouse where inmates are denied proper treatment, abused, and punished in ways that make them sicker. Through intimate stories of people in the system and those trying to fix it, Roth reveals the hidden forces behind this crisis and suggests how a fairer and more humane approach might look.

A ruthless dissection of American life in the late 1960s, Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays captures the mood of an entire generation, the ennui of contemporary society reflected in spare prose that blisters and haunts the listener. Set in a place beyond good and evil—literally in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the barren wastes of the Mojave Desert, but figuratively in the landscape of an arid soul—it remains more than three decades after its original publication a profoundly disturbing novel, riveting in its exploration of a woman and a society in crisis.

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.

When Nancy Hennessy is murdered, she leaves behind two best friends, an adoring husband and daughter, and a secret lover whose identity she took to the grave. Nancy was gorgeous, wealthy, and cherished by those who knew her - from the outside, her life was perfect. But as the investigation into her death flounders and her friends Eleanor and Mary wrestle with their grief, dark details surface that reveal how little they knew their friend, each other, and maybe even themselves.

1972, BLACK RIVER FALLS, WISCONSIN: Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby.

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.

Dr. Oliver Sacks argues the migraine cannot be understood simply as an illness, but must be viewed as a complex condition with a unique role to play in each individual's life.

First published in 2006, this updated edition describes new findings on the origins of DDD, the brain science supporting the diagnosis, and cutting-edge treatment approaches. DDD is examined from medical and psychiatric perspectives, but as the authors reveal, it also emerges in literary, philosophical, and spiritual investigations. Feeling Unreal thoroughly explores these different aspects in a fascinating and essential resource that is accessible to medical professionals and general listeners alike.

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.

Mental illness though can still carry a stigma. A case of ‘you’re not trying hard enough’, ‘or knuckling down and getting on with it’. But in more recent decades mental issues have come to be recognised as an illness, a disease rather than an affliction. We all remember horror stories of lobotomy’s and electric shock being used to ‘cure’ what society viewed as anti-social behaviour but illness, mental or physical is very real. Depression, schizophrenia, breakdown, psychosis are alarming events to have or to witness.

Busted for smoking pot, college-bound suburbanite Danny is incredulous when forced to spend the night in jail. He’s repulsed by his cellmate, a homeless and mentally ill drug addict who keeps him awake all night with his delusional rants. By morning, Danny’s world is completely upended.

Blake Butler and Molly Brodak instantly connected, fell in love, married, and built a life together. Both writers with deep roots in contemporary American literature, their union was an iconic joining of forces between two major and beloved talents. Nearly three years into their marriage, grappling with mental illness and a lifetime of trauma, Molly took her own life. In the days and weeks after Molly’s death, Blake discovered shocking secrets she had held back from the world, fundamentally altering his view of their relationship and who she was.