Mental Illness

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.

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.

Medical treatment for ADHD fails much too often - not because of the drugs themselves, but how they are given. New ADHD Medication Rules - Brain Science & Common Sense shows that patients can react very differently to ADHD prescriptions, resulting in missed diagnoses, imbalanced treatment and over or under medication.

On their first date, Mina told Oscar that she was bisexual, vegetarian, and on meds. He married her anyhow. A challenge to be met. She had low days, sure, but manageable. But now, maybe not so much.... Mina is standing on the George Washington Bridge late at night, staring over the edge, when a patrol car drives up. She tries to convince the policeman she's not about to jump, but he doesn't believe her. Oscar is called to pick her up.

The Complications is an intimate portrait of what it’s like to live with schizoaffective disorder of the bipolar type as well as a biting, revelatory critique of America’s mental health culture. Emmett Rensin has written and edited articles for major national media outlets, and taught writing and literature at prestigious schools. But he has also lost jobs and friends, been hospitalized and institutionalized, and cycled through a daunting combination of medications.

From a comic mastermind comes this brilliant collection of stories. Three teenagers believe they are witches. A woman defaces a local billboard. A bored landlord tries to influence his son's best friend. A cul-de-sac WhatsApp group discusses eggs at length. A heavily pregnant woman finds a way to time travel and a girl discovers joy on a stolen bicycle. Each tale paints a life in miniature and offers an escape chute from the catastrophes of modern life.

Everyone's familiar with the consequences of lost sleep: you're groggy and irritable, your focus is off, you don't perform at your best, and you're likely to dump sugary foods and caffeine into your system for an energy boost. But the effects of poor sleep go way beyond these concerns. Indeed, they can be life-threatening.

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 Beyond Madness—part memoir, part history, and part empathetic guide—Dr. Pruchno draws on her decades as a mental health professional, her own family's experiences with mental illness, and extensive interviews with people with serious mental illness to discuss how individuals live with these illnesses, including bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and major depression.

Dr. Nicholas Kardaras answers the question of why young people’s mental health is deteriorating as we become a more technologically advanced society. While enthralled with shiny devices and immersed in social media, our young people are struggling with record rates of depression, loneliness, anxiety, overdoses and suicide. Our immersion in toxic social media has created polarizing extremes of emotion and addictive dependency, while also acting as a toxic "digital social contagion”, spreading a variety of psychiatric disorders.

Negative self-talk can feel like an ever-present roommate who insists on giving you unsolicited opinions about every aspect of yourself—including your worth, appearance, personality, and life choices. Have you ever wondered where this annoying inner critic comes from? And more importantly, can you make it go away? Unfortunately, no matter what you do, negative thoughts will happen. It's simply how our brains are wired. But you can change the way you respond to these thoughts.

In this fascinating new exploration of mental illness, Professor Brendan Kelly examines ‘madness’ in history and how we have responded to it over the centuries. We travel from the psychiatric institutions of modern India to scientific studies of the brain in Victorian England. We discover the beginnings of formal asylum care and witness the experimental therapies of the cavernous psychiatric hospitals of the 19th and early 20th centuries in Ireland, England, Belgium, Italy, Germany and the United States.

Three years ago mortuary cosmetologist Phoebe Glassman lost her husband in a tragic accident. No longer the hopeful wife and mother she once was, Phoebe is disappearing into her grief and into the quietude of her job - restoring to the dead the illusion of life. Then the body of a woman named Pauline Steele arrives in the mortuary, and for Phoebe, everything changes. Pauline is unmistakably Phoebe’s mirror image and bears an alarmingly familiar tattoo. Even more startling is that among Pauline’s effects is a faded photograph of Phoebe.

So how do you flip your mind from a negative spiral into realistic and rebellious hope? How do you stop focusing on the why and realise that 'why not me' is just as valid a question? How we learn to respond to any given situation empowers us or destroys us. We have the ability in our minds to dictate our own outcomes—bad or good—and with the right skills and approach, we can be the master of our lives. How to Live When You Could Be Dead will show you how. It will awaken you to question your life as if you didn't have a tomorrow and live it in the way you want to today.

You've probably seen it before: a human brain dramatically lit from the side, the camera circling it like a helicopter shot of Stonehenge, and a modulated baritone voice exalting the brain's elegant design in reverent tones... to which this book says: Pure nonsense.

When it comes to caring for a loved one with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia, the right caregiving can make all the difference. Here, Patricia Boswell shares structured routines, life hacks, and best practices that are evidence-based and focused on maintaining the highest possible quality of life for the entire family.

If someone had told me in 2008 that the single most time-consuming issue facing me as one of the newest of America’s three thousand-and-eighty-one sheriffs would be mental health, I would have laughed. I was the SWAT team leader. I was a drug education officer on patrol and a street-level narcotics interdiction officer for a larger (by Iowa standards) sheriff’s office. I would do the occasional court-ordered, emergency mental health committal and the random transport from one health care facility to another mental health facility on a judge’s order from time to time.

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.

For some people, silence is a weapon. For Mallory "Mouse" Dodge, it's a shield. Growing up, she learned that the best way to survive was to say nothing. And even though it's been four years since her nightmare ended, she's beginning to worry that the fear that holds her back will last a lifetime. Now, after years of homeschooling with loving adoptive parents, Mallory must face a new milestone - spending her senior year at a public high school.

August is a misfit with a pyro streak, and Jack is a golden boy on the varsity rugby team - but their intense friendship goes way back. Jack begins to see increasingly vivid hallucinations that take the form of an elaborate fantasy kingdom creeping into the edges of the real world. With their parents' unreliable behavior, August decides to help Jack the way he always has - on his own. He accepts the visions as reality, even when Jack leads them on a quest to fulfill a dark prophecy.