Psychology Mental Illness

Do you find yourself lying awake at night, ruminating about the events of the day? Do you toss and turn, worrying about what you have to do in the morning or what you did earlier in the day? If so, you are not alone. In fact, insomnia is the most common sleep disorder faced by the general population today.

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.

Are we all a little crazy? Roughly fifteen percent of the population will have a psychotic experience, in which they lose contact with reality. Yet we often struggle to understand and talk about psychosis. Interactions between people build on the stories they tell each other-stories about the past, about who they are or what they want. In psychosis we can no longer rely on these stories, this shared language. So how should we communicate with someone experiencing reality in a radically different way than we are?

In Saving Normal, Allen Frances, one of the world's most influential psychiatrists, warns that mislabeling everyday problems as mental illness has shocking implications for individuals and society: Stigmatizing a healthy person as mentally ill leads to unnecessary, harmful medications, the narrowing of horizons, misallocation of medical resources, and draining of the budgets of families and the nation.

One of the country's leading researchers updates his revolutionary approach to solving - and preventing - children's sleep problems. Here Dr. Marc Weissbluth, a distinguished pediatrician and father of four, offers his groundbreaking program to ensure the best sleep for your child. In Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, he explains with authority and reassurance his step-by-step regime for instituting beneficial habits within the framework of your child's natural sleep cycles.

Thoughts, stories, and philosophy of life from someone living with mental illness

An intimate, compassionate, and expansive portrait of Borderline Personality Disorder that rejects the conventional wisdom that this condition is untreatable, told by a psychologist who specializes in BPD....

Self Comes to Mind is a nuanced and original chronicle of the evolution of the human brain. It reveals how the brain's development of a self becomes a challenge to nature's indifference and opens the way for the appearance of culture, a radical break in the course of evolution.

O mito do normal faz uma investigação cuidadosa sobre o trauma, o papel da sociedade em nossas doenças e os caminhos possíveis para a saúde e a cura. Neste mundo em que as doenças físicas e mentais são cada vez mais frequentes, o que é realmente “normal” quando se trata de saúde? Em quatro décadas de experiência clínica, o renomado médico Gabor Maté compreendeu que o conceito de normalidade adotado pela medicina está equivocado, pois negligencia o papel que o trauma, o estresse e as pressões cotidianas exercem sobre nosso corpo e nossa mente.

If you feel like your life is spinning out of control, you're definitely not alone! While anxiety is a natural reaction to stress, for some of us, it can become all-consuming - and ultimately debilitating. Thankfully, there is plenty you can do to combat anxiety with the help of this approachable guide. Inside, find out how adopting proven techniques like pinpointing triggers, improving health and eating habits, and learning to let go can help you effectively and deliberately manage your worries - and take back control of your life.

Around 250,000 people have had their genomes sequenced, and scientists expect that number to rise to one billion by 2025. Professor Steven J. Heine argues that the first thing we will do on receiving our DNA test results is to misinterpret them completely. Despite breathless (often lightly researched) media coverage about newly discovered "cancer" or "divorce" or "IQ" genes, the prospect of a DNA test forecasting how your life is going to turn out is vanishingly small.

You might not have heard of misophonia, but if you are often infuriated by the sound of chewing, breathing, snoring, a clock ticking, or any other specific trigger, you may have experienced it. In fact, it’s thought that one in five of us have it. Sounds Like Misophonia addresses what the condition is, how it manifests, and provides a guide to managing it. By clinical psychologist Dr Jane Gregory, this is the first practical self-help book to make sense of the condition, and help you design your own treatment plan tailored to your unique experience.

From New York Times best-selling author and blogger Heather B. Armstrong comes an honest and irreverent memoir - reminiscent of the New York Times best-seller Brain on Fire - about her experience as one of only a few people to participate in an experimental treatment for depression involving 10 rounds of a chemically induced coma approximating brain death.

Suicide has reached epidemic proportions in America, claiming over 45,000 lives each year—more than car accidents or homicides. For every person who dies there are about 10 unsuccessful attempts. Yet suicides are preventable, if we can grasp the complex factors behind it and look out for suicide’s signs in our families, communities, and colleagues. In this groundbreaking book, acclaimed journalist James Barrat delivers these insights with a deep dive into America’s suicide crisis.

The Lobotomist explores one of the darkest chapters of American medicine: the desperate attempt to treat the hundreds of thousands of psychiatric patients in need of help during the middle decades of the 20th century. Into this crisis stepped Walter Freeman, MD, who saw a solution in lobotomy, a brain operation intended to reduce the severity of psychotic symptoms. Drawing on Freeman's documents and interviews with Freeman's family, Jack El-Hai takes a penetrating look at the life and work of this complex scientific genius.

Moving, harrowing, and ultimately uplifting, Lori Schiller's memoir is a classic testimony to the ravages of mental illness and the power of perseverance and courage. At 17, Lori Schiller was the perfect child - the only daughter of an affluent, close-knit family. Six years later she made her first suicide attempt, then wandered the streets of New York City dressed in ragged clothes, tormenting voices crying out in her mind. Lori Schiller had entered the horrifying world of full-blown schizophrenia.

In The Sleep Revolution, Arianna explores all the latest science on what exactly is going on while we sleep and dream. She takes on the sleeping pill industry, and all the ways our addiction to technology disrupts our sleep. She also offers a range of recommendations and tips from leading scientists on how we can get better and more restorative sleep, and harness its incredible power.

As a research neuroscientist, Lise Eliot has made the study of the human brain her life's work. But it wasn't until she was pregnant with her first child that she became intrigued with the study of brain development. She wanted to know precisely how the baby's brain is formed, and when and how each sense, skill, and cognitive ability is developed. And most importantly, she was interested in finding out how her role as a nurturer can affect this complex process.

Despite all her best efforts to break the cycle of catastrophic, destructive patterns of mental illness, Anna Berry found herself at the end of her rope - unemployed, penniless, homeless, and in the throes of a psychotic episode that threatened to destroy her life. Alone and unwell, she manages to find her grip on life, seeks the help she needs, and embarks on a life and career that illustrate that mental illness does not have to be ruinous.

America has been the world leader in generating new mental health treatments and modern theories of the human psyche. We export our psychopharmaceuticals packaged with the certainty that our biomedical knowledge will relieve the suffering and stigma of mental illness. We categorize disorders, thereby defining mental illness and health, and then parade these seemingly scientific certainties in front of the world.