Psychology Memoirs

For most of human history, mental illness has been largely untreatable. Sufferers lived their lives - if they survived - in and out of asylums, accumulating life's wreckage around them. In 1948, all that changed when an Australian doctor and recently returned prisoner of war, working alone in a disused kitchen, set about an experimental treatment for one of the scourges of mankind - manic depression, or bipolar disorder. That doctor was John Cade and in that small kitchen he stirred up a miracle.

Sigmund Freud is known as the father of psychoanalysis and is perhaps the most significant figure in the history of psychology. He was the first to have recognized the influence of the unconscious and to have developed a theory of the structure of the mind that took it into account. Freud's ideas, including coping mechanisms, repression, denial, libido, and ego have become household terms, key elements of the modern understanding of the human experience.

On the morning of August 23, 1973, a man wearing a wig, makeup, and a pair of sunglasses walked into the main branch of Sveriges Kreditbank, a prominent bank in central Stockholm. He ripped out a submachine gun, fired it into the ceiling, and shouted, "The party starts!" This was the beginning of a six-day hostage crisis - and media circus - that would mesmerize the world, drawing into its grip everyone from Sweden's most notorious outlaw to the prime minister himself.

There are many myths about serial killers: that they are all dysfunctional loners; all white males; only motivated by sex; that they all travel and operate across a wide area; cannot stop killing; are all insane, or evil geniuses; and that they all want to get caught. Of course, there are some serial killers who fit into these categories, but the married Green River Killer was not a dysfunctional loner; there are plenty of female and non-Caucasian serial killers, Dr Harold Shipman was certainly not motivated by sex; and many serial killings (such as the Ipswich prostitute murders carried out by Steve Wright) happen within a confined area.

At the age of 27, married, living in New York, and working in book design, Mary Cregan gives birth to her first child, a daughter she names Anna. But it’s apparent that something is terribly wrong, and two days later, Anna dies - plunging Cregan into suicidal despair. Decades later, sustained by her work, a second marriage, and a son, Cregan reflects on this pivotal experience and attempts to make sense of it. She weaves together literature and research with details from her own ordeal - and the still visible scar of her suicide attempt....

When Going Through Hell...Don’t Stop!: A Survivor's Guide to Overcoming Anxiety and Clinical Depression is the audiobook version of the print book that was published in 2000. This compelling memoir tells the dramatic story of author Douglas Bloch’s battle with, and ultimate recovery from, a life-threatening depressive illness.

In ADHD and Me, he tells about the next 12 years as he learns to live with both the good and bad sides of life with ADHD. Blake's memoir offers, for the first time, a young person's account of what it's like to live and grow up with this common condition. Join Blake as he foils bullies, confronts unfair teachers, struggles with distraction and disorganization on exams, and goes sailing out-of-bounds and ends up with a boatload of spiders.

A short memoir packed with firsthand experience about a topic rarely discussed from the survivor's perspective, Beauty for Ashes: Memoir of a Traumatic Brain Injury Survivor shares my horrors and triumphs after sustaining a traumatic brain injury from a motor vehicle accident during the most promising part of my life. My goal is to support other trauma survivors, and those close to them, by discussing the ugly truths one can face with an injury that cannot be seen, yet is often misunderstood and underestimated.

In February of 1973, Nancy Weber put an ad in the Village Voice offering to trade places with another woman, a stranger, for a month. In hopes of better understanding what was fixed and final in each person - and what was invented, and therefore might be reinvented - they would use each other's names, live in each other's homes, love each other's loves, and do each other's work.

Bestselling author and psychologist Tony Bates has spent his career seeking to understand the lives of others. Here he turns his therapeutic eye on himself and describes the events and people in his own life that have made him the insightful thinker and teacher that he is today. He recalls traumatic events in his childhood that reverberated throughout his life and how, with therapy and time, he was eventually able to heal. He recounts the stories of the patients that affected him most deeply and informed both the direction of his work and his philosophy as a psychologist.

Step inside the death chamber and behind the walls of Ohio’s death row. Bill Kimberlin, PsyD, invites the listener on an extensive and unbiased journey inside Ohio’s death row in Watch Me Die: Last Words from Death Row. You will see how these inmates think as Kimberlin not only spends time interviewing them, but also eats meals with them and, in some cases, is the last person to speak with them before they are executed.

At age 20, Gabrielle Pelicci returned from her modeling career in NYC to her hometown of Scranton, PA, where her mother suddenly passed away. At her mother's funeral, Gabrielle had a spiritual experience that left her reeling and set her on a heroine's journey to learn about both the scientific and mystical explanations of human consciousness.

Anna's always had too many feelings. Or not enough feelings—she's never been quite sure. Debilitating panic. Extraordinary melancholy. Paranoia. Ambivalence. Fear. Despair. From anxious child to terrified parent, mental illness has been a constant. But between therapists' rooms and emergency departments, there's been a feeling even harder to explain … optimism. In this sharp-eyed and illuminating memoir, award-winning writer Anna Spargo-Ryan pieces together the relationships between time, mental illness, and our brain as the keeper of our stories.

What propels some individuals to reach extraordinary creative heights in the earliest years of life while others discover their passions decades later? Are prodigies imbued with innate talent? Do late bloomers reveal their talents because their skills require life experience and contemplation? Through engaging storytelling and intriguing historical and cutting-edge scientific research, best-selling author and acclaimed journalist Claudia Kalb explores these questions to uncover what makes a prodigy and what drives a late bloomer.

"Creepy crawling" was the Manson Family's practice of secretly entering someone's home and, without harming anyone, leaving only a trace of evidence that they had been there, some reminder that the sanctity of the private home had been breached. Now, author Jeffrey Melnick reveals just how much the Family creepy crawled their way through Los Angeles in the sixties and then on through American social, political, and cultural life for close to fifty years, firmly lodging themselves in our minds.

In 1991 the police were called to East 72nd St. in Manhattan, where a woman's body had fallen from a 12th-story window. The woman's husband, Herbert Weinstein, soon confessed to having hit and strangled his wife after an argument, then dropping her body out of their apartment window to make it look like a suicide. The 65-year-old Weinstein, a quiet, unassuming retired advertising executive, had no criminal record, no history of violent behavior - not even a short temper.

The best of this year's true crime writing from master true crime authors RJ Parker, Peter Vronsky, JJ Slate, Sylvia Perrini, and Michael Newton, who give us nine new shocking case accounts of serial killers.

Maude Julien's parents were fanatics who believed it was their sacred duty to turn her into the ultimate survivor - raising her in isolation, tyrannizing her childhood, and subjecting her to endless drills designed to "eliminate weakness". Maude learned to hold an electric fence for minutes without flinching and to sit perfectly still in a rat-infested cellar all night long (her mother sewed bells onto her clothes that would give her away if she moved). She endured a life without heat, hot water, adequate food, friendship, or any kind of affectionate treatment.

While other profilers tend to conceal the clear facts behind complex technical language and psychobabble, investigator Pat Brown actually tells it like it is. With the same dark wit that gets people who work with the criminally insane through their workday, Brown speaks frankly about the monsters among us who kill for sport. In Killing for Sport, Brown provides an honest portrayal of the predator-next-door, how he hunts for him victims, why he likes to torture them, where he tends to stash their bodies, and more.

In 2018, Leigh Timmis became the fastest person to cycle across Europe—in just 16 days, 10 hours and 45 minutes—breaking the previous world record by an astonishing 8 days and 17 hours. But when he set out to break the record, Leigh wasn't just trying to conquer the road. As he prepared his body for this ultra-endurance world record attempt, Leigh realized that he would have to confront deeper problems to make it to the finish line.