Psychology Memoirs

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.

The project was simple: An attractive, successful magazine journalist, Robin Rinaldi, would move into a San Francisco apartment, join a dating site, and get laid. Never mind that she already owned a beautiful flat a few blocks away, that she was 44, or that she was married to a man she'd been in love with for 18 years. What followed - a year of sex, heartbreak, and unexpected revelation - is the topic of this riveting memoir, The Wild Oats Project.

After a decade of therapy and a stint in a psychiatric ward to treat suicidal depression, Arianna Rebolini was “better.” She’d published her first book, enjoyed an influential, rewarding publishing job, and celebrated both a marriage and the birth of her first child—but none of it was enough to keep the desire to die at bay. One night, grappling with overwhelming debt and a prolonged depression, she composed goodbye letters to her husband and son while they slept just feet away.

In 2010, human rights reporter Mac McClelland left Haiti after covering the lingering devastation of the earthquake. Back home, McClelland finds herself imagining vivid scenes of violence. She can't sleep or stop crying. It becomes clear that she is suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, triggered by her trip and seemingly exacerbated by her experiences in the other charged places she'd reported from, places from where she thought she'd escaped emotionally unscathed.

Plagued by depression her entire life, it wasn’t until her early 50s that writer and book critic Bethanne Patrick, advocating for her own care, received a medical diagnosis that would set her on the path to wellness and stability. Recognizing the intergenerational effects of trauma and mental health struggles, Patrick unearths the stories of her past in order to forge a better future for herself and her two daughters, dismantling the stigmas surrounding mental health challenges that can plague families into silence and resignation.

In the tradition of Ann Rule and the international best seller Women Who Kill comes the first book that chronicles the psychological profiles of spouses who kill, from Scott Peterson to Rabbi Fred Neulander, told by a renowned psychotherapist who specializes in spousal behavior and the criminal mind.

Are you happy? Does it matter? Increasingly, governments seem to think so. As the UK government conducts its first happiness survey, Alastair Campbell looks at happiness as a political as well as a personal issue; what it should mean to us, what it means to him.

Confessions by Leo Tolstoy, narrated by Gary Middleton, is a deeply introspective and philosophical work that chronicles Tolstoy’s spiritual journey and existential search for meaning. In this profound and honest memoir, Tolstoy confronts life's most difficult questions—regarding faith, purpose, and the human condition. This timeless work captures his struggle to reconcile the reality of life and death, eventually leading to a spiritual awakening.

Eliot Ness presents the first complete picture of the real Eliot Ness. Both fearless and shockingly shy, he inspired courage and loyalty in men twice his age, forged law-enforcement innovations that are still with us today, and earned acclaim and scandal from both his professional and personal lives. Through it all, he believed unwaveringly in the integrity of law and the basic goodness of his fellow Americans.

Misfit, truant, delinquent. John Robison was never a model child, and he wasn’t a model dad either. Diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome at the age of 40, he approached fatherhood as a series of logic puzzles and practical jokes. When his son, Cubby, asked, “Where did I come from?” John said he’d bought him at the Kid Store and that the salesman had cheated him by promising Cubby would “do all chores”. He read electrical engineering manuals to Cubby at bedtime.

Uncovering the details of the experiments leads her to question the validity of that 65 percent statistic and the claims that it revealed something essential about human nature. Fleshed out with dramatic transcripts of the tests themselves, the book puts a human face on the unwitting people who faced the moral test of the shock machine and offers a gripping, unforgettable tale of one man’s ambition and an experiment that defined a generation.

Hormonal explores everything from contraception to PMS, in relation to anxiety, depression and taboos about hysteria and the 'hormonal' woman. It is a compelling portrait of the modern landscape of women and health, showing us how to navigate stigma and misinformation. Combining her own experiences with extensive research and expert contributions, Eleanor Morgan explores the relationship between the female body, the female mind and the ways in which women's bodies are being medicalised.

Nev Schulman is the host of the wildly popular TV series Catfish which investigates online relationships to determine whether they are based on truth or fiction (spoiler: it's almost always fiction).

As the title suggests, Fromm's is a wholeheartedly balanced view, inspired by great admiration for Freud's achievements but with a clear understanding of the preconceptions which blinkered his vision - notably those stemming from the bourgeois materialism of his society, his certainty of the inferiority of women and his inability to conceive of psychical phenomena for which physiological roots could not be demonstrated.

The author describes in detail all the insanity, disturbing behaviors, oppressive symptoms, and various feeling associated with the mental battles within her own mind. The author suffers from clinical depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, and borderline personality disorder. She struggles with suicidal thoughts and attempts, self-mutilating behaviors, mania, paranoia, anxiety, and psychosis with intense hallucinations of all five of her senses, and multiple delusions, including the belief that she is the "second-coming of Christ".

Aileen Wuornos operated like no other female serial killer; she targeted strangers, shot them at point-blank range, and took their cars and personal belongings home as trophies to impress her lover with. She was known as “America’s First Female Serial Killer”, “The Damsel of Death”, “The Florida Highway Killer”, and “The Highway Hooker” and has been featured in movies, documentaries, books, works of art, and even an opera based on her mesmerizing case.

This book is about a journey. A journey of perspective. We all go through life with our own perceptions and expectations based on our pasts, experiences, and beliefs. Beliefs of how things are or how they should be. We interpret experiences and assign meanings to them. Many times, the meanings we assign, and the perceptions we have based on them, are very limited. We project our preconceived notions into situations which oftentimes keeps us from fully understanding or appreciating the opportunities we have at our fingertips.

In early 2013, whilst working as the Borough Commander for Southwark in South London, John suffered a major breakdown and a consequent battle with crippling depression. After a career spent policing the streets and racing to be first at the scenes of crimes and catastrophes, he found himself in pieces, unable to put one foot in front of the other. Blue is a memoir of crime and calamity, of adventure and achievement, of friendship and failure, of laughter and loss, of the best and the worst of humanity, of serious illness and slow recovery.

"What was the likelihood my adopted daughter would have my father's hazel eyes and my mother's mental illness?" In this fiercely candid memoir, Dr. Pruchno, a scientist widely acclaimed for her research on mental illness and families, shows how mental illness threatened to destroy her own family. Not once, but twice.