Mental Illness

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.

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?

Medical treatment for ADHD fails much too often - not because of the drugs themselves, but how they are given. New ADHD Medication Rules - Brain Science & Common Sense shows that patients can react very differently to ADHD prescriptions, resulting in missed diagnoses, imbalanced treatment and over or under medication.

This memoir that "will take your breath away" chronicles a harrowing journey through homelessness and poverty in New York City, followed by a turbulent experience in foster care (Jeanette Walls, New York Times bestselling author of The Glass Castle). This powerful memoir exposes the harsh...

Leading medical innovator Kenneth Bock, MD, has helped change the lives of more than 1,000 children, and in this important book he offers help to children everywhere. This is the book that finally puts hope within reach. Doctors have generally overlooked the connections among the 4-A disorders, despite their concurrent rise and the presence of many medical clues.

Driven to the point of obsession to find his missing younger brother, Teddy, and wrapped up in a romance that may or may not be the real thing, Miles is forever chasing shadows. As Miles feels his world closing around him, he struggles to keep it open, but what you think you know about his world is actually a blur of gray, and the sharp focus of reality proves startling.

The study of classic and contemporary films can provide a powerful avenue to understand the experience of mental illness. In Madness at the Movies, James Charney, MD, a practicing psychiatrist and long-time cinephile, examines films that delve deeply into characters’ inner worlds, and he analyzes moments that help define their particular mental illness.

"Narrator Saskia Maarleveld's enthusiasm makes Weller's exhaustive research as engaging as fiction." — AudioFile Magazine A remarkably candid biography of the remarkably candid—and brilliant—Carrie Fisher In her 2008 bestseller, Girls Like Us, Sheila Weller—with heart and a profound...

Blake Butler and Molly Brodak instantly connected, fell in love, married, and built a life together. Both writers with deep roots in contemporary American literature, their union was an iconic joining of forces between two major and beloved talents. Nearly three years into their marriage, grappling with mental illness and a lifetime of trauma, Molly took her own life. In the days and weeks after Molly’s death, Blake discovered shocking secrets she had held back from the world, fundamentally altering his view of their relationship and who she was.

An innovative somatic and attachment-based treatment for working with children and adolescents who suffer from complex trauma and neglect "[This] is a ground-breaking new approach to treating traumatized children, based on the combination of keen clinical observation, sensory integration, and a...

There are an estimated 6.5 million people in the US who suffer from dementia—a statistic that is only anticipated to increase as time goes on. As their condition worsens, patients become increasingly unable to care for themselves and have to rely on someone else, usually a loved one, to look after them.

Dr. Nicholas Kardaras answers the question of why young people’s mental health is deteriorating as we become a more technologically advanced society. While enthralled with shiny devices and immersed in social media, our young people are struggling with record rates of depression, loneliness, anxiety, overdoses and suicide. Our immersion in toxic social media has created polarizing extremes of emotion and addictive dependency, while also acting as a toxic "digital social contagion”, spreading a variety of psychiatric disorders.

Anxiety is a very serious issue and especially the fear of illness is a real ordeal for many sufferers. But fear is also a feeling that every human being carries within him or her, which is vital or essential for survival and is stronger or weaker in each person depending on their personality. Fear drives, inspires, mobilizes one's own forces, leads to success, but can also make you sick - so sick that life becomes hell. Hypochondria - as the fear of illness is specifically called - is a phenomenon of completely exaggerated fears that can push sufferers to their limits.

For years Helen Knightly has given her life to others - to her haunted mother, to her enigmatic father, to her husband, and grown children. When she finally crosses a terrible boundary, her life comes rushing in at her in a way she never could have imagined. Unfolding over the next 24 hours, this searing, fast-paced audiobook explores the complex ties between mothers and daughters, wives and lovers, the meaning of devotion, and the line between love and hate.

Nathan was different and Sally knew it. From his early childhood, Nathan was bursting with creativity and uncontainable energy, struggling not only with learning issues but also with anxiety and OCD. He saw the world through his own unique lens - one that often caused him to be labeled as "bad", "troubled", or someone in need of "fixing". Bravely choosing to listen to her motherly intuition rather than the loud voices of the world, Sally dared to believe that Nathan's differences could be part of an intentional design.

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.

The Complications is an intimate portrait of what it’s like to live with schizoaffective disorder of the bipolar type as well as a biting, revelatory critique of America’s mental health culture. Emmett Rensin has written and edited articles for major national media outlets, and taught writing and literature at prestigious schools. But he has also lost jobs and friends, been hospitalized and institutionalized, and cycled through a daunting combination of medications.

Hoarding: What Everyone Needs to Know demystifies this complex problem, what it looks like and why it may develop and how it can be treated. With their combined expertise in psychological treatments for hoarding and community interventions, Drs. Steketee and Bratiotis explain how to understand hoarding as a mental illness, describing the disorder in layman's terms and explaining the various facets and manifestations of the behavior.

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.

The inspiration for the PBS series Mysterious of Mental Illness, Shrinks brilliantly tells the "astonishing" story of psychiatry's origins, demise, and redemption (Siddhartha Mukherjee). Psychiatry has come a long way since the days of chaining "lunatics" in cold cells and parading them as...