Mental Illness

Broken Brain, Fortified Faith is the story of one family's journey through schizophrenia, navigating the uncharted waters of mental illness to find help for their daughter, Amber, and support for their family. This memoir is an honest look at the stress, anger, education, and finally, hope experienced through eyes of a mother. Along the way, she questions her trust in God as their family encounters setbacks, inadequate treatments, and additional family health crises.

When Robert Hine's daughter, Elene, first showed signs of unhappiness as a little girl, no one dreamed she would grow up to have a serious personality disorder. As an early baby boomer, Elene reached adolescence and young womanhood in the midst of the counterculture years. Her father, a respected professor of American history at the University of California, shares the story of his family's struggle to keep Elene on track and functional, to see her through her troubles with delusions and medication, and eventually to help her raise her own children.

Concerns about memory and other thinking skills are common, particularly in middle age and beyond. Due to worries about declining brain health, some seek out dubious products or supplements purportedly designed to improve memory and other cognitive abilities. Fortunately, scientific research has uncovered a clear-cut set of evidence-based activities and lifestyle choices that are inexpensive or free and known to promote brain and cognitive functioning. John Randolph translates this science in an engaging and accessible way.

You survived a stroke, but now you’re dealing with the painful uncertainty, anxiety, and depression left in its wake. You’re ready to take control and take back your mental health—you just need a little help. You never had this level of anxiety or depression before, but your stroke changed everything. That was my story, too. Until I reached my breaking point and had to get help.

"What was the likelihood my adopted daughter would have my father's hazel eyes and my mother's mental illness?" In this fiercely candid memoir, Dr. Pruchno, a scientist widely acclaimed for her research on mental illness and families, shows how mental illness threatened to destroy her own family. Not once, but twice.

E. Fuller Torrey's audiobook provides an inside perspective on the birth of the federal mental health program. On staff at the National Institute of Mental Health when the program was being developed and implemented, Torrey draws on his own first-hand account of the creation and launch of the program, extensive research, one-on-one interviews with people involved, and recently unearthed audiotapes of interviews with major figures involved in the legislation. As such, this book provides historical material previously unavailable to the public.

The book bridges the dangerous divide between faith communities and those living with the stigma of mental health challenges. Faith leaders seeking greater understanding for those with troubled minds as well as those impacted by brain illnesses (including loved ones) will benefit from listening to Roberts narrate his personal and pastoral journey through bipolar disorder.

With aspirations of being a successful lawyer, Jonathan embarks on a path to make his dreams come true, but is ultimately, unable to do so due to his schizoaffective disorder. In this candid and unflinching memoir, Jonathan reveals his story in all its rawness: the ups, the downs, the wins, the losses, the highs and the darkest of lows.

The last place Lisa Eley expects to be is a despondent patient in a psychiatric hospital on suicide watch fighting for her life. As an African American single parent from northwest Baltimore, Lisa knows knock-down, drawn-out hardships and resilient comebacks very well. She rises above every land mine life sets, detonating each with her quiet will and unyielding determination to defeat every adversity in her path. Faith and fate lead her to a new job with a leading agency, a pivotal success leap she thinks. What happens next will have this mild-mannered, upstanding citizen and worshiping Christian plot murder.

Taking the Cape Off shares Fire Chief Pat Kenny's journey to overcome his perceived failure as a leader in his most cherished duty, that of being a protector. His "Cape" failed to protect his 20-year-old son Sean from dying by suicide after a lifelong battle with mental illness. His anguish was complicated by his role as the leader of a fire department.

We live in an age uniquely attentive to the problem of mental illness. More than half of us will be diagnosed with a mental illness or disorder at some point in our lifetime. It has been easy, for centuries, to relegate persistent emotional and mental struggles entirely to the realm of a failed personal work ethic ("Just don't worry so much!"), not enough faith ("Just pray harder!"), or, in recent years, a chemical imbalance in our brains ("Just take this pill!").

Traditional psychiatry, psychotherapy, and pastoral counseling - many Christian parents have tried these methods to help their troubled tweens, teens, and young adults, but have found that nothing works. These parents are frustrated, feel criticized by their church community, and no one seems to understand their teen, with caregivers providing outdated advice. In Your Teen’s Miraculous Brain, Dr. Nina Farley-Bates combines Christian principles and scientific methodology to bring relief to struggling families, gleaning from her 20 years of experience to help teens thrive.

The search for hope is most urgent at the patient's bedside. The Anatomy of Hope takes us there, bringing us into the lives of people at pivotal moments when they reach for and find hope, or when it eludes their grasp. Through these intimate portraits, we learn how to distinguish true hope from false, why some people feel they are undeserving of it, and whether we should ever abandon our search.

I was executive director for a nonprofit for those with mental illness, I gave speeches from Washington DC to Berkeley. People told me to write a book, so I did. It was about 20 pages. Basically, it was on of my speeches. I decided I didn't know enough to write a book and to take a year to do some research. That research extended over four years. I self-published it five months before the advent of Kindle. I updated it, added about 80 pages and published a second edition in January of 2019.

When a child faces a physical health crisis, friends and family rally around to provide support. But when a child is diagnosed with mental illness, their families often find themselves struggling alone. Having raised a mentally ill daughter, author Andrea Berryman Childreth has first-hand experience with the shame and stigma these families face, hiding behind a mask of normalcy while feeling completely helpless and out of control at home. On the Edge provides a realistic and practical guide to parenting a child with mental illness.

Childhood trauma, mental illness, addiction, and incarceration are far too common in the US today. Recovery from even one of these issues is challenging, yet many people live with the stark reality of more than one of these circumstances every day. Our systems of care offer some help, but sometimes even the best programs don't yield lasting results. What does a person do when medication, therapy, drug treatment, and support groups are ultimately ineffective for them?

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is one of the most common childhood conditions, and for a majority of affected individuals, symptoms and impairment associated with this disorder persist into adolescence and adulthood. Although rates of college entry and college completion among individuals with ADHD are lower than in peers without ADHD, ADHD is the most common disability reported among first-year college students.

Those in uniform keep our world safe and often pay a high price for fulfilling their duty mentally and emotionally. Retired Sergeant Eric Weaver can attest to this, as he lives with mental illness and struggled with the issue of suicide on numerous occasions, including multiple hospitalizations, while serving as a police sergeant. In Overcoming the Darkness, he gives a raw accounting of his own experiences coupled with knowledge and pragmatic advice gained from 20 years of instructing literally thousands in law enforcement about mental illness, substance use, PTSD, and suicide.

If Naomi had picked tails, she would have won the coin toss. She wouldn't have had to go back for the yearbook camera, and she wouldn't have hit her head on the steps. She wouldn't have woken up in an ambulance with amnesia. She certainly would have remembered her boyfriend, Ace. She might even have remembered why she fell in love with him in the first place. She would understand why her best friend, Will, keeps calling her "Chief".

Over the last decade, scientists have discovered the importance and widespread presence in the body of a remarkable family of proteins known as prion proteins. Research links various types of prion proteins to neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's—and this has fueled the search for new drugs that could halt the progression of these terrible disorders. Other discoveries have revealed the essential roles prion proteins play in memory and immunity, and the part they may have played in the beginnings of life on our planet.