Mental Illness

Sight Unseen reveals the cultural and biological realities of race, gender, and sexual orientation from the perspective of the blind. Through 10 case studies and dozens of interviews, Ellyn Kaschak taps directly into the phenomenology of race, gender, and sexual orientation among individuals born blind, along with the everyday epistemology of vision. Kaschak's work reveals not only how the blind create systems of meaning out of cultural norms but also how cultural norms inform our conscious and unconscious interactions with others regardless of our physical ability to see. She exposes gender, race, and sexual orientation as unconscious and pre-verbal in the sighted, an aspect of implicit bias.

After a near fatal stroke in 1995, Robert McCrum has gained an intimate understanding of his own mortality. Twenty-two years on, his friends have joined him in experiencing Prospero's 'every third thought' of death as a dominating theme of life. McCrum asks: can we make peace with what Freud calls 'the necessity of dying'? Searching for answers leads him to brain surgeons, psychologists, cancer patients and writers for advice and wisdom.

Mike Welles had everything under control. He was a good student, an outfielder on the baseball team, a good son, a loyal friend. But that was before. There's a voice in his head. A friend, trying to help him regain control. More than that: The voice can guide him to become better and stronger than he was before, to rid his life of everything holding him back. To figure out who he is again. If only Mike will listen.

Before you read this, think for a moment: Do you know where your keys are? What was the name of that last visitor to your office? We rely on memory every moment of the day, but many of us constantly complain that we're losing it faster than we ever imagined.

About Pain promises to deepen and expand both your empathy and your understanding of pain. From a professional and at the same time personal perspective, Dr. Aarons sheds a starkly honest light on a taboo subject that inevitably affects every one of us.

Lina was a precocious toddler - charming, chatty, joyful. At the age of three, in the aftermath of her second MMR vaccine, first came a seizure, and then, to her parents’ horror, the loss of Lina’s ability to play, use language, and control her impulses. Over the next few years they continued to lose Lina. She communicated her acute discomfort by biting, screaming, hitting, laughing maniacally, and throwing violent tantrums.

My lips are white. Sixteen-year-old Sep stares into the bathroom mirror. It’s not some weird lipstick (she never wears lipstick). Her lips are just - white. In a panic, she digs up an old lipstick and smears it on her colorless lips. But soon, more and more white spots begin to bloom, spreading their chalky tendrils across her olive brown skin. Does she have a disease? Is she turning into some kind of freak?

Emily's the sick one . . . all of the time.

Plagued with some sort of cold or fever or bizarre aches and pains for much of her life, Emily thought the dizziness and stomachaches at the start of her senior year were just another bout of "Emily flu". But when they didn't go away, she knew something was seriously wrong. Eventually diagnosed with the rare and incurable West Nile virus, Emily watched her senior year and the future she had planned for go up in smoke.

With a 50/50 shot at inheriting her family's genetic curse, Rose is skeptical about pursuing anything that presumes she'll live to be a healthy adult - including her dream career in ballet and the possibility of falling in love. But when she meets a boy from a similarly flawed genetic pool and gets an audition for a dance scholarship across the country, Rose begins to question her carefully laid rules.

An intensely powerful account of a teen, bullied for herport-wine stain, who must summon her personal strength to survive abduction andhorrific abuse at the hands of a deranged killer

Sixteen-year-old Sarah Meadows longs for "normal."Born with a port-wine stain covering half her face, she has beenplagued by stares, giggles, bullying, and disgust all her life. But when she's abducted onthe way home from school, Sarah is forced to uncover the courage she never knewshe had, become a hero rather than a victim, and learn to look beyond her faceto find the beauty and strength she has inside. It's that - or succumb to akiller.

Simple, imaginative activities and expressive therapies designed for caregivers to engage and connect with people living with dementia. Finding the creativity in the journey through dementia is a challenge millions of people face. One in three Americans knows someone with the disease. This practical book offers caregivers hands-on ideas for meaningful, creative activities they can do with their patients, family members, or friends who have dementia.

Writer and singer Tinky Weisblat kept a journal during the final year of her mother’s life. Jan Weisblat was 93 and suffered from dementia. Pulling Taffy shares journal entries, history, family photographs, and recipes that document their time together. It pays tribute to the vibrant spirit of Jan, whom her daughter called Taffy. This informal, candid memoir explores the ways in which Taffy’s view of the world changes as her Alzheimer’s disease develops... and the ways in which it remains the same.

Say goodbye to stress once and for all! Do you feel like the never-ending bills and increasing family and work responsibilities make your life a living hell? Do you feel helpless and overwrought about the stress that engulfs you? Don't worry! You have more control over the stress than you think. Successful stress management can help you free yourself from the stifling pressure stress puts on you. Stress management is the way you take control of your life.

It is a cautionary tale of the legacy of the danger of a poisonous food additive and the failure of a government, corrupted by greed, to safeguard the health and welfare of its people. This is a handbook that teaches the tools you will need to protect those you love and inform them about the causes of a number of diseases that have, until now, proven inexplicably elusive to a medical community beholden to Big Pharma... While Science Sleeps.

New science has revealed the importance of sleep as one of the key foundation stones of good health. Take control of your sleep with more than 40 proven strategies, based on a 360-degree approach to achieving excellent sleep. Find targeted meditation, movement, and breathing exercises; discover how light, color, and sound could hold the key to healthy sleep; and find out how to get to the root of the underlying causes of chronic sleep problems.

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).

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.

In this novel of family and redemption, a mother struggles to save her 18-year-old daughter from the devastating consequences of mental illness by forcing her to deal with her bipolar disorder. New York Times best-selling author Bebe Moore Campbell draws on her own powerful emotions and African-American roots, showcasing her best writing yet.

In This Is Awkward, Sammy Rhodes talks directly, honestly, and hilariously (because sometimes we need to laugh) about the most painfully uncomfortable subjects in our lives. In chapters like "Parents Are a Gift (You Can't Return Them)" and "D is for Depression", he boldly goes where most of us fear to tread, revealing that we can be liberated by the embrace of a god who knows the most shameful things about us and loves us all the same. Because nothing is too awkward for God.

An electrifying true story of one young woman's nightmarish descent into the hell of schizophrenia and her courageous battle to rejoin the real world, such is the story of Lori Schiller. Once she had it all - a loving family, devoted friends, intelligence, and opportunity. Then at age 15 she began to suffer from symptoms of schizophrenia, hearing voices that began to take over her life. At 23, she committed herself to a private mental institution and spent the next 7 years waging a war against the voices that urged her to kill her family, her doctor, herself. This account of a journey into and out of madness is at once gripping, heartening, and ultimately triumphant.