Psychology Memoirs

At thirty-seven, Dr. Stephanie Cacioppo was content to be single. She was fulfilled by her work on the neuroscience of romantic love—how finding and growing with a partner literally reshapes our brains. That was, until she met the foremost neuroscientist of loneliness. A whirlwind romance led to marriage, to sharing an office at the University of Chicago. After seven years of being inseparable at work and home, she lost her beloved husband following a devastating battle with cancer.

An honest and compelling memoir, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet is Merri Lisa Johnson’s account of her borderline personality disorder and how it has affected her life and relationships. Johnson describes the feeling of "bleeding out" unable to tell where she stopped and where her partner began. A self-confessed "psycho girlfriend," she was influenced by many emotional factors from her past. She recalls her path through a dysfunctional, destructive relationship, while recounting the experiences that brought her to her breaking point.

This is Diablo's captivating fish-out-of-water story of her yearlong walk on the wild side, from quiet gentlemen's clubs to multilevel sex palaces and glassed-in peep shows. In witty prose she gives readers a behind-the-scenes look at this industry through a writer's keen eye, chronicling her descent into the skin trade and the effect it had on her self-image and her relationship with her now husband.

A deeply reported, revealing biography of tennis phenomenon and activist Naomi Osaka, telling the untold story behind her Grand Slam-winning career, her headline-making advocacy for racial justice and mental health, and the challenges of a life in the international spotlight.

When Pepper Stetler was told that her daughter who has Down Syndrome would be regularly required to take IQ tests to secure support in school, she asked a simple question: why? In questioning the authority and relevance of the test, Stetler sets herself on a winding investigation into how the IQ test came to be the irrefutable standard for measuring intelligence. The unsettling history causes Stetler to wonder what influence this test will have over her daughter's future and whether Louisa should be taking it at all.

There's no doubt that Dein has been one of the most significant and influential figures in British football for over three decades—operating at club and international level. He was a prime mover in the creation of the Premier League, hugely influential within the England set-up and, of course, was the mastermind—along with Arsène Wenger—in creating the glory days of Arsenal Football Club, leading the team for almost a quarter of a century.

When Susannah Breslin is a toddler, her parents enroll her in an exclusive laboratory preschool at the University of California, Berkeley, where she becomes one of 128 children who are research subjects in an unprecedented 30-year psychological experiment that predicts who she and her cohort will grow up to be. Decades later, trapped in an abusive marriage to a man with a violent history and battling breast cancer, she starts to wonder how growing up under a microscope shaped the person she became and her life choices. Is she the narrator of the story of her life, or is something else?

An emotionally rich, moving and nuanced memoir from the Yorkshire and England wicketkeeper. As a young boy of eight, Jonny Bairstow was dealt a cruel blow. His father David 'Bluey' Bairstow, the combative and very popular wicketkeeper and captain of Yorkshire, took his own life at the age of 47. David left behind Jonny; Jonny's sister, Becky, and half brother, Andy; and his wife, Janet, who had recently been diagnosed with cancer at the time of his death.

Sigmund Freud revolutionized the way in which we think about ourselves. From its beginnings as a theory of neurosis Freud developed psychoanalysis into a general psychology, which became widely accepted as the predominant mode of discussing personality and interpersonal relationships. Anthony Storr goes one step further and investigates the status of Freud's legacy today and the disputes that surround it.

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....

Today, neuroscientists are imaging, mapping, testing, and dissecting the source of the worst behavior imaginable in the brains of the people who lack a conscience: psychopaths. Neuroscientist Dean Haycock examines the behavior of real life psychopaths and discusses how their actions can be explained in scientific terms, from research that literally looks inside their brains to understanding how psychopaths, without empathy but very goal-oriented, think and act the way they do.

In 1917, working alone in a remote Swiss asylum, psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach devised an experiment to probe the human mind: a set of 10 carefully designed inkblots. For years he had grappled with the theories of Freud and Jung while also absorbing the aesthetic movements of the day, from futurism to dadaism. A visual artist himself, Rorschach had come to believe that who we are is less a matter of what we say, as Freud thought, than what we see.

Unlocking the doors to the psych ward, NHS psychiatrist Dr Benji Waterhouse provides a fly-on-the-padded-wall account of medicine’s most mysterious and controversial speciality. Why would anyone in their right mind choose to be a psychiatrist? Are the solutions to people’s messy lives really within medical school textbooks? And how can vulnerable patients receive the care they need when psychiatry lacks staff, hospital beds and any actual cures?

In March 2017, Niamh Fitzpatrick’s life fell apart overnight. Her beloved sister, Dara, was killed in a helicopter crash. Soon afterwards, Niamh’s marriage ended, and she feared she would lose her home. Life as she knew it was gone forever, and the grief was overwhelming. A psychologist for many years, Niamh’s job is to help clients through the toughest times in their lives.

Mark Vonnegut set out in search of Eden with his VW bug, his girlfriend, his dog, and his ideals, but genetic predisposition and a whole lot of shit going down made him crazy in a culture that told him mental illness is a myth and schizophrenia is a sane response to an insane society. Describing his experiences during the late '60s and early '70s, Eden Express reveals how Mark went from being a recent college grad who was in love and living communally on a farm to having nervous breakdowns.

On February 29, 2000, John Price took out a restraining order against his girlfriend, Katherine Knight. Later that day, he told his coworkers she had stabbed him and that if he were ever to go missing, it was because Knight had killed him. The next day, Price didn’t show up for work. A coworker was sent to check on him. They found a bloody handprint by the front door, and they immediately contacted the police. The local police force was not prepared for the chilling scene they were about to encounter.

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry, Robert Lowell put his manic-depressive illness (now known as bipolar disorder) into the public domain, creating a language for madness that was new and arresting. As Dr. Jamison brings her expertise in mood disorders to bear on Lowell’s story, she illuminates not only the relationships among mania, depression, and creativity but also the details of Lowell’s treatment and how illness and treatment influenced the great work that he produced (and often became its subject).

Russell Brand explores the idea of mentoring and shares what he's learned from the guidance of his own helpers, heroes and mentors. Could happiness lie in helping others and being open to accepting help yourself? Mentors - the follow-up to the New York Times best seller Recovery - describes the benefits of seeking and offering help.

A revelatory examination of the most significant demographic shift since the baby boom—the sharp increase in the number of people who live alone—that offers surprising insights on the benefits of this epochal change. With eye-opening statistics, original data, and vivid portraits of people who go solo, Klinenberg upends the conventional wisdom to deliver the definitive take on how the rise of living alone is transforming the American experience.

A charismatic, heart-warming business memoir that's filled with life lessons on overcoming obstacles, Copy This! is a book for every business owner looking to grow a company, every manager helping his team perform, every visionary trying to launch a new idea, and for every mother and father of a child suffering from dyslexia or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.