Staff Picks
#BroaderBookshelf 2022: Memoirs That Shine a Light on Mental Health
- Mona Verma
- Monday, May 13, 2019
Collection
Fulfill the "read a memoir by someone who is not a celebrity" prompt with these titles.
This list is part of the #BroaderBookshelf 2022 reading challenge. Find more lists here.
The Man Who Couldn't Stop
OCD and the True Story of a Life Lost in Thought
Published in 2015
"Have you ever had a strange urge to jump from a tall building or steer your car into oncoming traffic? You are not alone. In this ... fusion of science, history, and memoir, [science editor and writer] David Adam explores the weird thoughts that exist within every mind and explains how they drive millions of us toward obsession and compulsion"--Dust jacket flap.
A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise
A True Story About Schizophrenia
Published in 2018
"Dazzlingly, daringly written, marrying the thoughtful originality of Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts with the revelatory power of Neurotribes and The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, this propulsive, stunning book illuminates the experience of living with schizophrenia like never before. Sandra Allen did not know her uncle Bob very well. As a child, she had been told he was "crazy," that he had spent time in mental hospitals while growing up in Berkeley in the 60s and 70s. But Bob had lived a hermetic life in a remote part of California for longer than she had been alive, and what little she knew of him came from rare family reunions or odd, infrequent phone calls. Then in 2009 Bob mailed her his autobiography. Typewritten in all caps, a stream of error-riddled sentences over sixty, single-spaced pages, the often incomprehensible manuscript proclaimed to be a "true story" about being "labeled a psychotic paranoid schizophrenic," and arrived with a plea to help him get his story out to the world. In A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise, Allen translates her uncle's autobiography, artfully creating a gripping coming-of-age story while sticking faithfully to the facts as he shared them. Lacing Bob's narrative with chapters providing greater contextualization, Allen also shares background information about her family, the culturally explosive time and place of her uncle's formative years, and the vitally important questions surrounding schizophrenia and mental healthcare in America more broadly. The result is a heartbreaking and sometimes hilarious portrait of a young man striving for stability in his life as well as his mind, and an utterly unique lens into an experience that, to most people, remains unimaginable"-- Provided by publisher.
He Wanted the Moon
The Madness and Medical Genius of Dr. Perry Baird, and His Daughter's Quest to Know Him
Published in 2015
Brain on Fire
My Month of Madness
Published in 2012
The story of twenty-four-year-old Susannah Cahalan and the life-saving discovery of the autoimmune disorder that nearly killed her -- and that could perhaps be the root of "demonic possessions" throughout history.
Shook One
Anxiety Playing Tricks on Me
Published in 2018
"Charlamagne Tha God, New York Times bestselling author of Black Privilege and cohost of Power 105.1's The Breakfast Club, reveals his blueprint for breaking free from your fears and anxiety to reach that elusive next level of success. Fear is holding you back. It's time to turn the tables and channel your fears to actually fuel your success. Being "shook" is more than a rap lyric for Charlamagne, it's his mission to overcome. While it may seem like he is ahead of the game and should have nothing to worry about, he is still plagued by anxieties--fear of being weak; fear of being a bad dad; fear of being a worse husband; and ultimately, fear of failure. Shook One chronicles his journey to beat back those fears and empowers you to no longer be held back from your potential. Shook One details the ways anxiety has been a driving force in Charlamagne's life since childhood. For many years, he stressed over what he thought were personal shortcomings: being unpopular in school, potential rejection by women, being ugly, and worst of all, falling into the life of stagnation or crime that caught up so many of his friends and family in his hometown of Moncks Corner, South Carolina. Even after achieving national prominence as a radio personality, Charlamagne still found himself paralyzed by thoughts that he wouldn't be able to take his career to the next level. But now, in Shook One, he is working through these problems with help from mentors, guests on his show, and therapy. He knows therapy and showing weakness are anxiety producing in the black community, but this is one of the reasons he wants to own his truth--to clear a path for others in hopes that they won't feel shame while dealing openly with their mental health"-- Provided by publisher.
Manic
A Memoir
Published in 2008
A personal account of life with bipolar disorder documents the author's experience with the condition's extreme highs and lows, in a memoir that also traces her therapies and the disease's impact on her relationships.
Unbearable Lightness
A Story of Loss and Gain
Published in 2010
Known for her roles on the hit TV shows "Ally McBeal" and "Arrested Development," de Rossi delivers a revelatory and searing account of the years she spent secretly suffering from bulimia, all the while living under the glare of Hollywood's bright lights.
Hurry Down Sunshine
Published in 2008
Hurry Down Sunshine tells the story of the extraordinary summer when, at the age of fifteen, Michael Greenberg's daughter was struck mad. It begins with Sally's visionary crack-up on the streets of Greenwich Village, and continues, among other places, in the out-of-time world of a Manhattan psychiatric ward during the city's most sweltering months.
Girl, Interrupted
Published in 1993
Kaysen writes of her experiences, augmented by pages from her medical record, in a psychiatric hospital and of the social and emotional assumptions that divide people into deviant or normal.
The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind
My Tale of Madness and Recovery
Published in 2018
"As a deadly cancer spread inside her brain, leading neuroscientist Barbara Lipska was plunged into madness--only to miraculously survive with her memories intact. In the tradition of My Stroke of Insight and Brain on Fire, this powerful memoir recounts her ordeal and explains its unforgettablelessons about the brain and mind. In January 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 intomadness, exhibiting dementia- and schizophrenia-like symptoms that terrified her family and coworkers. But miraculously, just as her doctors figured out what was happening, the immunotherapy they had prescribed began to work. Just eight weeks after her nightmare began, Lipska returned to normal. With one difference: she remembered her brush with madness with exquisite clarity. In The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind, Lipska describes her extraordinary ordeal and its lessons about the mind and brain. She explains how mental illness, brain injury, and age can change our behavior, personality, cognition, and memory. She tells what it is like to experience these changes firsthand. And she reveals what parts of us remain, evenwhen so much else is gone"-- Provided by publisher.
Mental
Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind
Published in 2017
"A riveting memoir and a fascinating investigation of the history, uses, and controversies behind lithium, an essential medication for millions of people struggling with bipolar disorder. It began in Los Angeles in 1993, when Jaime Lowe was just sixteen. She stopped sleeping and eating, and began to hallucinate--demonically cackling Muppets, faces lurking in windows, Michael Jackson delivering messages from the Neverland Underground. Lowe wrote manifestos and math equations in her diary, and drew infographics on her bedroom wall. Eventually, hospitalized and diagnosed as bipolar, she was prescribed a medication that came in the form of three pink pills--lithium. InMental,Lowe shares and investigates her story of episodic madness, as well as the stability she found while on lithium. She interviews scientists, psychiatrists, and patients to examine how effective lithium really is and how its side effects can be dangerous for long-term users--including Lowe, who after twenty years on the medication suffers from severe kidney damage.Mentalis eye-opening and powerful, tackling an illness and drug that has touched millions of lives and yet remains shrouded in social stigma. Now adjusting to a new drug, her pursuit of a stable life continues as does her curiosity about the history and science of the mysterious element that shaped the way she sees the world and allowed her decades of sanity.Lowe travels to the Bolivian salt flats that hold more than half of the world's lithium reserves, rural America where lithium is mined for batteries, and to lithium spas that are still touted as a tonic to cure all ills.With unflinching honesty and humor,Lowe allows a clear-eyed view into her life, and an arresting inquiry into one of mankind's oldest medical mysteries"-- Provided by publisher.
This Close to Happy
A Reckoning with Depression
Published in 2017
"A gifted and audacious writer confronts her lifelong battle with depression and her search for release 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. She recounts the travails of growing up in a large, affluent family where there was a paucity of love and of basics such as food and clothing despite the presence of a chauffeur and a cook. She goes on to recount her early hospitalization for depression in poignant detail, as well as her complex relationship with her mercurial, withholding mother. Along the way Merkin also discusses her early, redemptive love of reading and gradual emergence as a writer. She eventually marries, has a child, and suffers severe postpartum depression, for which she is again hospitalized. Merkin also discusses her visits to various therapists and psychopharmocologists, which enables her to probe the causes of depression and its various treatments. The book ends in the present, where the writer has learned how to navigate her depression, if not "cure" it, after a third hospitalization in the wake of her mother's death. "-- Provided by publisher.
On Edge
A Journey Through Anxiety
Published in 2017
A wry, sympathetic, bracingly honest account of living with anxiety, coupled with deep reportage on the science of anxiety disorders. -- Provided by publisher.
The Buddha & the Borderline
My Recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder Through Dialectical Behavior Therapy, Buddhism, & Online Dating
Published in 2010
The Collected Schizophrenias
Essays
Published in 2019
"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. Opening with the journey toward her diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, Wang discusses the medical community's own disagreement about labels and procedures for diagnosing those with mental illness, and then follows an arc that examines the manifestations of schizophrenia in her life. In essays that range from using fashion to present as high-functioning to the depths of a rare form of psychosis, and from the failures of the higher education system and the dangers of institutionalization to the complexity of compounding factors such as PTSD and Lyme disease, Wang's analytical eye, honed as a former lab researcher at Stanford, allows her to balance research with personal narrative"-- Publisher's description.