Psychology Mental Illness

Psychiatry has come a long way since the days of chaining "lunatics" in cold cells and parading them as freakish marvels before a gaping public. But, as Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, the former president of the American Psychiatric Association, reveals in his extraordinary and eye-opening audiobook, the path to legitimacy for "the black sheep of medicine" has been anything but smooth.

“Pat, we need to kill the dog.” When a sudden mental illness struck his wife, Patrick Dylan found himself living with an eerie stranger. Scared and unprepared, he began a desperate battle to protect her from a mysterious disease, shelter their children from her bizarre behavior, and recover the woman he loved. Within weeks, she had been admitted to the emergency room, the hospital, and the local crisis facility, but none of the experts could provide an answer. As her illness eluded diagnosis, the family’s struggle was only beginning.

Alfredo Zotti, a professional musician and bipolar survivor with a university degree in social anthropology and three years study of psychology, provides an introduction to music theory with specific case studies of applications for Alzheimer's, bipolar disorder, autism spectrum disorder (ASD), schizophrenia, anxiety, depression, and other issues.

If you have a family member who suffers from mental illness, but refuses to seek treatment, you may feel like you're caught in a trap. If you try making life easier for your loved one, you wind up perpetuating dependency and entitlement. If you push for treatment, you are met with resistance or outright animosity. And when you reach out to professionals for help, you are told that nothing can be done unless your family member is ready to change. So, how can you escape the "family trap?"

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.

Make your bed and actually sleep in it. The Book of Sleep provides dozens of quick, easy, and evidence-based strategies that are more effective and sustainable than sleep medication for people who suffer from insomnia. Based in CBT-I (cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia), the techniques in this book were developed by a clinical psychologist who specializes in insomnia treatment. Find the relief you need and wake up feeling truly restored. A good night's sleep isn’t just a dream anymore.

Susan Doherty's groundbreaking book brings us a population of lost souls, ill-served by society, feared, shunted from locked wards to rooming houses to the streets to jail and back again. For the past ten years, some of the people who cycle in and out of the severely ill wards of the Douglas Institute in Montreal have found a friend in Susan, who volunteers on the ward, and then follows her friends out into the world as they struggle to get through their days. With their full cooperation, she brings us their stories, which challenge the ways we think about people with mental illness.

This “incredibly captivating” (Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies) portrait of schizophrenia, the most malignant and mysterious mental illness, by renowned psychiatrist Jeffrey Lieberman, interweaves cultural and scientific history with dramatic patient profiles and clinical experiences to impart a revolutionary message of hope. For the first time in history, we can effectively treat schizophrenia, limiting its disabling effects—and we’re on the verge of being able to prevent the disease’s onset entirely.

America has made mental illness a crime. Jails in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago each house more people with mental illnesses than any hospital. In this revelatory book, journalist Alisa Roth goes deep inside the criminal justice system to tell how and why it has become a warehouse where inmates are denied proper treatment, abused, and punished in ways that make them sicker. Through intimate stories of people in the system and those trying to fix it, Roth reveals the hidden forces behind this crisis and suggests how a fairer and more humane approach might look.

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.

Nearly half of US citizens over the age of 85 are suffering from some kind of dementia and require care. Loving Someone Who Has Dementia is a new kind of caregiving book. It's not about the usual techniques, but about how to manage on-going stress and grief. The book is for caregivers, family members, friends, and neighbors, as well as educators and professionals - anyone touched by the epidemic of dementia. Dr. Boss helps caregivers find hope in "ambiguous loss" - having a loved one both here and not here, physically present but psychologically absent.

Dr. Oliver Sacks argues the migraine cannot be understood simply as an illness, but must be viewed as a complex condition with a unique role to play in each individual's life.

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.

If you have a loved one—a spouse, adult child, or other family member—who has a mental illness such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or depression and is experiencing symptoms like psychosis, you need help. Delusions and hearing voices can be frightening. Mania can be unpredictable. Isolation and withdrawal can make things worse. Authors Katherine Ponte and Izzy Goncalves have been there. They are there. During Katherine's ongoing eighteen-year recovery from severe bipolar disorder and depression, her husband Izzy has been her primary caregiver.

It began in Los Angeles in 1993, when Jaime Lowe was just 16. She stopped sleeping and eating and began to hallucinate - demonically cackling Muppets, faces lurking in windows, Michael Jackson delivering messages from the Neverland Underground. Lowe wrote manifestos and math equations in her diary and drew infographics on her bedroom wall. Eventually hospitalized and diagnosed as bipolar, she was prescribed a medication that came in the form of three pink pills - lithium.

Until sophomore year of high school, 15-year-old Allison Britz lived a comfortable life in an idyllic town. She was a dedicated student with tons of extracurricular activities, friends, and loving parents at home. But after awakening from a vivid nightmare in which she was diagnosed with brain cancer, she was convinced the dream had been a warning. Allison believed that she must do something to stop the cancer in her dream from becoming a reality.

In Second Firsts, Rasmussen walks you through her Life Reentry process to help you break grief's spiral of pain, so you can stop simply surviving and begin to live again. She shows you that loss can actually be a powerful catalyst to creating a life that is in alignment with your true passions and values. The resilience, strength, and determination that have gotten you through this difficult time are the same characteristics that will help you craft your wonderful new life.

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?

Are you curious about the shadowy parts of the human psyche? Join Dr. Daniel Mierlak, a psychiatrist for 25 years, on a journey to the stranger corners of human experience. Here you'll meet: Tony, chauffeur to the fabulously rich, who overcomes crippling anxiety only to find himself descend into a homicidal rage following a botched cosmetic procedure. Amanda, hospitalized for mania, who sees a change to her medicine as an assassination attempt, and then stalks her doctor for a year after discharge.

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.