Schizophrenia Fiction

An intimate, moving book written with the immediacy and directness of one who still struggles with the effects of mental and chronic illness, The Collected Schizophrenias cuts right to the core. Schizophrenia is not a single unifying diagnosis, and Esmé Weijun Wang writes not just to her fellow members of the “collected schizophrenias” but to those who wish to understand it as well.

Enveloped in the dark inner kingdom of her schizophrenia, 16-year-old Deborah is haunted by private tormentors that isolate her from the outside world. With the reluctant and fearful consent of her parents, she enters a mental hospital where she will spend the next three years battling to regain her sanity with the help of a gifted psychiatrist. As Deborah struggles toward the possibility of the "normal" life she and her family hope for, the listener is inexorably drawn into her private suffering and deep determination to confront her demons.

1972, BLACK RIVER FALLS, WISCONSIN: Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby.

Stephen Leeds is perfectly sane. It's his hallucinations who are mad. A genius of unrivaled aptitude, Stephen can learn any new skill, vocation, or art in a matter of hours. However, to contain all of this, his mind creates hallucinatory people - Stephen calls them aspects - to hold and manifest the information. Wherever he goes, he is joined by a team of imaginary experts to give advice, interpretation, and explanation. He uses them to solve problems...for a price. Then a company hires him to recover stolen property - a camera that can allegedly take pictures of the past....

From a comic mastermind comes this brilliant collection of stories. Three teenagers believe they are witches. A woman defaces a local billboard. A bored landlord tries to influence his son's best friend. A cul-de-sac WhatsApp group discusses eggs at length. A heavily pregnant woman finds a way to time travel and a girl discovers joy on a stolen bicycle. Each tale paints a life in miniature and offers an escape chute from the catastrophes of modern life.

Reality, it turns out, is often not what you perceive it to be - sometimes, there really is someone out to get you. For fans of Silver Linings Playbook and Liar, this thought-provoking debut tells the story of Alex, a high school senior - and the ultimate unreliable narrator - unable to tell the difference between real life and delusion. Alex fights a daily battle to figure out what is real and what is not.

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.

Adam is a pretty regular teen, except he's navigating high school life while living with paranoid schizophrenia. His hallucinations include a cast of characters that range from the good (beautiful Rebecca) to the bad (angry Mob Boss) to the just plain weird (polite naked guy). An experimental drug promises to help him hide his illness from the world. When Adam meets Maya, a fiercely intelligent girl, he desperately wants to be the normal, great guy that she thinks he is. But as the miracle drug begins to fail, how long can he keep this secret from the girl of his dreams?

Two months have passed, and the horrors of Death Farm still torment police officer Susan Marlan and college professor Eric Evans. Susan struggles to regain her zeal for fighting crime, while Eric is slowly coming to terms with his newfound “gift” of seeing the dead. Seeking much-needed rest, Susan and Eric follow their musician friend Jake and his band to Washington State. But once they reach the cheerless town of Clancy, Eric’s murderous visions start again. Something seems wrong about its aloof citizens - and suspicions turn to dread when members of Jake’s band go missing.

As Cady struggles under the enormous pressure at Harvard, she investigates her brother’s final year, armed only with a blue notebook of Eric’s cryptic scribblings. She knew he had been struggling with paranoia, delusions, and illusory enemies - but what tipped him over the edge? Voices fill her head, seemingly belonging to three ghosts who passed through the university in life, or death, and whose voices, dreams, and terrors still echo the halls. Among them is a person whose name has been buried for centuries, and another whose name mankind will never forget.

After her mother, Brenda, passed away and her father sold the family home, broadcaster and writer Emma Kennedy found herself floundering, unable to make peace with the complex, charismatic woman who had been her mum. And then they found the letters. This heartbreakingly funny book about the impact of discovering lost letters is a celebration of correspondence; those lost acts of penned love, the vivid snapshots in time scattered back through a life.

A thought-provoking look into the brilliant mind of a person diagnosed with Schizophrenia as he slips in and out of reality.

It’s been a year since Special Agent Susan Marlan and Professor Eric Evans worked a taxing missing persons case together on the Olympic Peninsula. Though the couple have since separated, Eric must reluctantly turn to Susan for advice when a student accused of murdering his ex-girlfriend comes to Eric for help proving his innocence. Susan - busy tracking down two missing employees of San Francisco’s Gruben Dam - warns Eric to be cautious, as the young man has connections to Defenders of the Earth (DOTE), an ecoterror group operating out of San Francisco.

Hailed as a "work of art" by the New York Times, this best-selling classic brings a deft touch and understanding spirit to the story of a teenage girl's descent into madness - and the three friends who are determined to walk with her where adults fear to tread.

Surviving Schizophrenia chronicles a path where biochemical intervention is not the sole factor relevant to mental illness. Varied "world views" - Christianity, Maori Pacifika lore, or the credo of a New Age, which have influenced myself - demand a broad approach to mental health. Reckless prescription of drugs should not substitute exclusively for alternative therapies.

Blamed as a child for her baby sister's death, Dianne Rucker swore she'd never come back to Dentonville, Texas. But the kind aunt who took her in after her mother abandoned her is getting remarried, and she misses the cousins who came to be sisters, Yolanda and Regina. Going back to Dentonville also means facing her drug-addicted mother, now slipping even farther into schizophrenia. But Dianne isn't the only one struggling, and Aunt Gloria may have the most life-altering secret of all.

Britney loves her husband. He's kind, sweet, and an upstanding citizen. He usually does everything with a moral compass, except for that one time when he killed a group of people. That was simply a stability slip. He pled insanity and served his time in a mental institution.

When Cara and Brendan first meet, she’s fresh out of college, recovering from the recent death of her mother, and spending time on Martha’s Vineyard while trying to figure out her next steps. She’s swept away by Brendan’s humor and charm, and intoxicated by his thrilling, dangerous secret: He can breathe underwater. Able to stay beneath the waves for longer than should be possible, Brendan reveals that he is part of a secret experimental unit of the US Special Forces. And Cara, struck by the power of his conviction, by his unstoppable charisma, and by the evidence before her, believes him.

Twenty years ago, Fiona May Airie, pilot James Airie's little sister, disappeared. You might say it caused his family to unravel. It would happen to any family. But now James, a diagnosed schizophrenic, thinks all the unraveling is finally over, and it's time to try and ravel everything back...

David Sears grew up in the shadow of his brilliant younger sister, Diana, convinced by their father that she would accomplish great things. Instead, she married and had a son, Jason, who, like David and Diana's father, is schizophrenic. Her husband, Mark, a geneticist, never made peace with Jason's condition.