Mental Health Biography

Several years ago, Patrick J. Kennedy shared the story of his personal and family challenges with mental illness and addiction—and the nation’s—in his bestselling memoir, A Common Struggle. Now, he and his Common Struggle coauthor, award-winning healthcare journalist Stephen Fried, have crafted this powerful new book sharing the untold stories of others—a special group who agreed to talk about their illnesses, treatments, and struggles for the first time.

In 2015, Barbara Lipska - a leading expert on the neuroscience of mental illness - was diagnosed with melanoma that had spread to her brain. Within months, her frontal lobe, the seat of cognition, began shutting down. She descended into madness, exhibiting dementia- and schizophrenia-like symptoms that terrified her family and coworkers. But miraculously, the immunotherapy her doctors had prescribed worked quickly. Just eight weeks after her nightmare began, Lipska returned to normal. With one difference: she remembered her brush with madness with exquisite clarity.

Holly Hill (pseudonym) gave up her job at the behest of her wealthy boyfriend - and then found herself dumped and penniless. After spending six weeks in bed pining for her lost love, she was encouraged by a friend to be "open-minded" about her career choices - and ended up placing an online ad for a sugar daddy. She received an almost overwhelming response from all sorts of men, but most of them were married men whose wives had lost interest in sex. As Holly interviewed the men and settled on a candidate, she decided to record what happened next.

In six enthralling stories drawn from his own clinical experience, Irvin D. Yalom once again proves himself an intrepid explorer of the human psyche as he guides his patients - and himself - toward transformation. With eloquent detail and sharp-eyed observation, Yalom introduces us to a memorable cast of characters.

Part one of Three Years With A Monster comes to you in real time as Dennis scribbled it down in his journal and recapped the events every few months in blog form. You will experience the heartbreaking daily struggle as it unfolds. Eating disorders are nearly impossible to understand unless you come face-to-face with them. This book brings you so close you can smell the monster’s breath. The Wilkinsons were directed to use family-based therapy and dialectical behavioural therapy. Helpful explanations and observations of these tools are contained in this section.

In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six of America's finest writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. All six of these men were alcoholics, and the subject of drinking surfaces in some of their finest work, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to A Moveable Feast.

On October 20, 1973, in San Francisco, a White couple strolling down Telegraph Hill was set upon and butchered by four young Black men. Thus began a reign of terror that lasted six months and left 15 Whites dead and the entire city in a state of panic. The perpetrators wanted nothing less than a race war.

Patric Gagne realized she made others uncomfortable before she started kindergarten. Something about her caused people to react in a way she didn’t understand. She suspected it was because she didn’t feel things the way other people did. Emotions like fear, guilt, and empathy eluded her. For the most part, she felt nothing. And she didn’t like the way that “nothing” felt.

With heart-racing urgency and unflinching honesty, Jenkins takes you inside the grips of addiction and the desperate decisions it breeds. She is a born storyteller who lived an incredible story, from blackmail by an ex-boyfriend to a soul-shattering deal with a drug dealer, and her telling brims with suspense and unexpected wit. But the true surprise is her path to recovery. Tiffany breaks through the stigma and silence to offer hope and inspiration to anyone battling the disease - whether it’s a loved one or themselves.

Moses and Troy Horne here. Your mental-toughness guides! We know exactly how you feel. If you are reading this, you probably have a young athlete who struggles with in-game stress and maybe even sports performance anxiety. That is why this version was mostly written by Moses. As of the time of the writing of this book, Moses Horne is a 15-year-old elite athlete who can talk directly about the triumphs and struggles of working toward being mentally tough. This is the only book that I know of with input from an actual young athlete.

The heartbreaking true story of a young, troubled mother who needed help. The 16th fostering memoir by Cathy Glass. It is the first time Laura has been out since the birth of her baby when Cathy sees her in the school playground. A joyful occasion, but Cathy has the feeling something is wrong. By the time she discovers what it is, it is too late. This is the true story of Laura, whose life touches Cathy's in a way she could never have foreseen.

In the insightful narrative tradition of Oliver Sacks, Monkey Mind is an uplifting, smart, and very funny memoir of life with anxiety - America’s most common psychological complaint. We all think we know what being anxious feels like - it is the instinct that made us run from wolves in the prehistoric age and pushes us to perform in the modern one - but for forty million American adults, anxiety is an insidious condition that defines daily life. Yet no popular memoir has been written about that experience - until now.

"True belonging doesn't require us to change who we are. It requires us to be who we are." Social scientist Brené Brown, PhD, LMSW, has sparked a global conversation about the experiences that bring meaning to our lives - experiences of courage, vulnerability, love, belonging, shame, and empathy. In Braving the Wilderness, Brown redefines what it means to truly belong in an age of increased polarization.

Baek Sehee is a successful young social media director at a publishing house when she begins seeing a psychiatrist about her—what to call it?—depression? She feels persistently low, anxious, endlessly self-doubting, but also highly judgemental of others. She hides her feelings well at work and with friends, performing the calmness her lifestyle demands. The effort is exhausting, overwhelming and keeps her from forming deep relationships. This can't be normal. But if she's so hopeless, why can she always summon a yen for her favourite street food: the spicy rice cake, tteokbokki?

In Episodes, lifelong best friends Kat and Mara take listeners on an unfiltered journey through friendship, mental illness, and survival. Kat, a successful professional, is preparing for marriage and motherhood. On her fourth round of IVF, it happened—a frantic call to Mara. Mara comes over to find Kat, her friend of 25 years—the one who'd always been levelheaded, hilarious, and over-the-top thoughtful—trying to jump through a window.

"Are you one of us?" a patient once asked Marsha Linehan, the world-renowned psychologist who developed dialectical behavior therapy. "Because if you were, it would give all of us so much hope." Over the years, DBT had saved the lives of countless people fighting depression and suicidal thoughts, but Linehan had never revealed that her pioneering work was inspired by her own desperate struggles as a young woman. Only when she received this question did she finally decide to tell her story.

As a passionate advocate for mental health, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau believes that in order to know and accept ourselves fully, we need to understand why we think and feel the way we do, and recognize the experiences, attitudes, and patterns that may be holding us back. And yet, all of us are capable of growth and positive change, if we're willing to stay open and curious throughout our lives.

Back in January 1995 in Los Angeles, California, a Singaporean pornstar named Annabel Chong took cultural rebellion to an extreme, on terms that had never been negotiated before. She was filmed having sex with a long receiving line of men, servicing them 251 times over a ten-hour period to set a new world record: The World’s Biggest Gangbang.

Human sacrifice still goes on uncomfortably close to home - cases have been found in the U.S., Europe, and the United Kingdom. In other parts of the world, such as South America, ritual killing is almost commonplace. Human Sacrifice investigates the terrifying current spate of human sacrifices and ritual killings. Jimmy Lee Shreeve draws on police reports and interviews with the victims' families to paint a horrifying picture of ritual sacrifice at home and abroad.

Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their 12 children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins—aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the 10 Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic.