Mental Health Biography

Ms. Walker writes warmly and compassionately about the long journey of mental illness she and her family have endured for decades. She also discusses various related issues and offers tangible suggestions for self-care—all easily accomplished by anyone. Families like hers often find themselves in a constant vortex of unforeseen circumstances, and her practical suggestions encourage others so they might begin to thrive despite the chaos.

From Hell to Hope: A Memoir of Addiction and Mental Illness takes you on a visceral journey with Kate, from the confusion of her teenage years to the fragile beauty of motherhood. Witness her battle with addiction and bipolar disorder, the desperate lows that threatened to consume her, and the flickering moments of hope that fueled her fight.

My Beautiful Psychosis is a stunning debut memoir from international award winning documentary filmmaker, Emma Goude. It is a gritty tale of transformation, depicting from the inside some of the most powerful experiences a human mind can endure. What if psychosis is really a wake up call? Emma is a 20-something who likes to party and take drugs...until she decides to give them up...and that’s when the insomnia starts. After five nights without sleep she ends up in A&E. Three questions determine whether she is sane or not.

Despite 21st-century fears of an "epidemic" of loneliness, its history has been sorely neglected. A Biography of Loneliness offers a radically new interpretation of loneliness as an emotional language and experience. Using letters and diaries, philosophical tracts, political discussions, and medical literature from the 18th century to the present, historian of the emotions Fay Bound Alberti argues that loneliness is not a historical, universal phenomenon. It is, in fact, a modern emotion: before 1800, its language did not exist.

In this deeply moving and resourceful memoir, beloved actor-director and New York Times best-selling author Joe Pantoliano takes aim at the stigma attached to what he calls “brain dis-ease” by writing candidly and humorously about his own journey through clinical depression and addiction.

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.

Fearless is about how you reclaim life when all feels lost. It’s about learning to reach out for help and healing. It’s about speaking up and the power of sharing our stories. In past years Jelena has dealt with disordered eating and reclaimed her body; she has stood up to body shaming and online abuse. She has faced her mental health demons head-on to find stability in the chaos of life. She has endured a devastating relationship breakdown. This audiobook is about starting at the bottom and building yourself back up.

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?

Secrets of a Good Girl pulls back the curtain on an erotic world hiding in plain sight - a world where women are in control. In this erotic memoir, listeners will follow the real journey of “Josie”, as she goes behind closed doors into European sex clubs, aboard private yachts, and to exclusive erotic enclaves around the world.

This Close to Happy is the rare, vividly personal account of what it feels like to suffer from clinical depression, written from a woman's perspective and informed by an acute understanding of the implications of this disease over a lifetime. Taking off from essays on depression she has written for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, Daphne Merkin casts her eye back to her beginnings to try to sort out the root causes of her affliction.

A fascinating, transformative look at the therapeutic powers of psychedelic drugs, particularly in the treatment of PTSD, and the past fifty years of scientific, political, and legal controversy they have ignited, by award-winning journalist Tom Shroder.

Drawing on rarely consulted archives, Crews shows us a man who blundered tragicomically in his dealings with patients, who never produced a corroborated cure, who promoted cocaine in one decade and was deluded by it in the next, who misunderstood the psychological controversies of the era, and who advanced his career through falsifying case histories and betraying the mentors who had helped him to rise.

Switching Time is the first story centering on multiple personality disorder to be told by the treating physician. It is the incredible saga of a young woman stranded in unimaginable darkness who, in order to survive, created 17 different versions of herself. One by one, Karen's "alters" began showing themselves: men, women, young boys, a toddler, black, white, vicious, nurturing, prim, licentious. And their "stepping out" confronted Baer with the challenge of a lifetime.

Just as polio loomed over the 1950s, and AIDS stalked the 1980s and ’90s, posttraumatic stress disorder haunts us in the early years of the twenty-first century. Over a decade into the United States’ “global war on terror,” PTSD afflicts as many as 30 percent of the conflict’s veterans. But the disorder’s reach extends far beyond the armed forces. In total, some twenty-seven million Americans are believed to be PTSD survivors. Yet to many of us, the disorder remains shrouded in mystery, secrecy, and shame.

Sophie Crockett spent most of her childhood suffering from crippling anxiety. Diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, she became a virtual prisoner in her own home, afraid to venture outside. After battling with depression, eating disorders and self-harm, Sophie had the courage to re-enter society in her late teens.

We live in a loud, loud world. Whether it's the criticism of others, the clamor of injustice, or the voice of anxiety from within, we are constantly being bombarded with noise. So what does it mean to find peace in the midst of all the noise? Is there a way to acknowledge the struggles we face and learn how to manage the stressors and voices that trigger us while believing in the promises and goodness of God?

Stacy Pershall grew up as an overly intelligent, depressed, deeply strange girl in Prairie Grove, Arkansas, population 1,000. From her days as a 13-year-old Jesus freak through her eventual diagnosis of bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder, this spirited memoir chronicles Pershall's journey through hell and her struggle with the mental health care system.

Lauren Windas is one of the estimated 250,000 people suffering with CFS in the UK. Whilst at university in 2012, she fell ill with a viral infection and was later diagnosed with CFS. Since then she has devoted herself to reclaiming her health and being able to live a full life, drawing on the knowledge of experts to help manage her often mysterious and hard-to-manage condition. In Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Lauren recounts the highs and lows of her own health journey and experiences,.

From the moment war broke out across Europe in 1914, the world entered a new, unparalleled era of modern warfare. Soldiers faced relentless machine gun shelling, incredible artillery power, flame throwers, and gas attacks. Within the first four months of the war, the British Army recorded the nervous collapse of ten percent of its officers; the loss of such manpower to mental illness left the army unable to fill its ranks. Soldiers Don't Go Mad tells for the first time the story of the soldiers and doctors who struggled with the effects of industrial warfare on the human psyche.

Unrealized Reality is not just a memoir; it is a witness to the power of truth, the resilience forged through life’s trials, and the beauty that can arise from even the deepest wounds. Stephanie’s story reveals that healing is a journey, not a destination, and that strength is often born from our willingness to face life raw and real, without distortion.