Madness: a Memoir

Author: Kate Richards
Publisher: Penguin Group Australia
ISBN: 1742535623
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Book Description
Winner of the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature 2014 nonfiction prize. Shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards 2013 nonficiton prize. It's not every day you get to admit you're mad. The thing with psychosis is that when I'm sick I believe the delusional stuff to the same degree that you might know the sky is above and the earth below. And if someone were to say to me that the delusional thinking is, in fact, delusional, well that's the same as if I assure you now that we walk on the sky. Of course you wouldn't believe me, and that's why it's sometimes so hard for people who are sick like this to know that they need treatment. Psychosis and severe depression have a huge effect on how you relate to other people and how you see the world. It's a bit like being in a vacuum, or behind a wall of really thick glass . . . you lose any sense of connectedness. You're cast adrift from everyone and everything that matters. I've lived with acute psychosis and depression for the best part of twenty years. This is the story of my journey from chaos to balance, and from limbo to meaning. Kate Richards is a trained doctor currently working in medical research. 'Demands to be read' Sunday Age 'Heart wrenching, mind bending' Daily Telegraph 'A mysteriously beautiful book' Michael McGirr, The Age 'A gifted writer and storyteller' Courier-Mail 'Astonishing' Herald Sun

Art and Madness

Author: Anne Roiphe
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307473961
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
Coming of age on Park Avenue in the 1950s, Anne Roiphe had an adolescence entrenched in privilege, petticoats, and social rules. Young women at the time were expected to give up personal freedom for devotion to home and children. Instead, Roiphe chose Beckett, Proust, Sartre, and Mann as her heroes, and became one of the girls draped across the sofa at parties with George Plimpton, Norman Mailer, and William Styron, sometimes with her young child in tow. For a time she was satisfied to play the muse, but at the age of twenty-seven, divorced and finally freed of the notion that any sacrifice was worth making for art, she began to write. Here, in her clear-sighted, perceptive, and unabashed memoir, Roiphe shares with astonishing honesty the tumultuous adventure of self-discovery that finally led to her redemption.

Girl, Interrupted

Author: Susanna Kaysen
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0804151113
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Book Description
30th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she'd never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital. Her memoir of the next two years is a "poignant, honest ... triumphantly funny ... and heartbreaking story" (The New York Times Book Review). WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR The ward for teenage girls in the McLean psychiatric hospital was as renowned for its famous clientele—Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles—as for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary. Kaysen's memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. It is a brilliant evocation of a "parallel universe" set within the kaleidoscopically shifting landscape of the late sixties. Girl, Interrupted is a clear-sighted, unflinching document that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.

Committed

Author: Paolina Milana
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1647420431
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 343

Book Description
After a decade of caring for crazy and keeping her mother’s mental illness a secret from the outside world, twenty-year-old Paolina Milana longs for just one year free from the madness of her home. When she gets the chance to go to an out-of-state school, she takes it, but her family won’t leave her be. Letter after letter arrives, constantly reminding her of the insanity rooted in her family tree. Even worse, the voices in her own head whisper words she’s not sure are normal. “Please don’t make me be like Mamma,” she prays to a God she’s not sure is listening. The unexpected death of her father soon after she returns home leaves Paolina in shock—and in charge of her paranoid schizophrenic mother. But it isn’t until she is twenty-seven and her sister two years her junior explodes in a psychotic episode and, just like Mamma, is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and must be committed, that Paolina descends into her own despair, nearly losing herself to the darkness. Poignant and impactful, Committed is one woman’s story of resilience as she struggles to stay sane despite the madness that surrounds her.

Madness Made Me

Author: Mary O'Hagan
Publisher: Openbox
ISBN: 9780473279806
Category : Mentally ill
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Book Description
After her journey through madness Mary O'Hagan realised the mental health system and society did more harm than good. 'Madness Made Me' is a myth-busting account of madness and our customary responses to it through the lens of lived experience. O'Hagan's journey took her from the psychiatric hospital to the United Nations and many places in between as a leader in the international mad movement. Her fundamental message is that madness is profoundly disruptive but full human experience. The trouble is most people don't see it that way, from the experts who make up clever theories about brain disease to the people down the road who have irrational fears about mad axe-murderers. 'Madness Made Me' is a compelling and beautifully written book that uncovers widespread injustice. It ends with vision for a world that holds hope for people with mental distress and treats them with respect and humanity.

Another Kind of Madness

Author: Stephen Hinshaw
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250113369
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Book Description
Parallel to An Unquiet Mind and The Glass Castle, a deeply personal memoir calling for the destigmatization of mental illness

My Brother's Madness

Author: Paul Pines
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810132990
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 311

Book Description
My Brother's Madness is based on the author's relationship with his brother—who had a psychotic breakdown in his late forties—and explores the unfolding of two intertwined lives and the nature of delusion. Circumstances lead one brother from juvenile crime on the streets of Brooklyn to war-torn Vietnam, to a fast-track life as a Hollywood publicist to owning and operating The Tin Palace, one of New York's most legendary jazz clubs, while his brother falls into, and fights his way back from, a delusional psychosis. My Brother's Madness is part thriller, part exploration that not only describes the causes, character, and journey of mental illness, but also makes sense of it. It is ultimately a story of our own humanity, and answers the question, Am I my brother's keeper?

Inferno

Author: Catherine Cho
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
ISBN: 1250623707
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice "Inferno is a disturbing and masterfully told memoir, but it’s also an important one that pushes back against powerful taboos. . ." --The New York Times Book Review "Explosive" --Good Morning America "Sublime" --Bookpage (starred review) When Catherine Cho and her husband set off from London to introduce their newborn son to family scattered across the United States, she could not have imagined what lay in store. Before the trip’s end, she develops psychosis, a complete break from reality, which causes her to lose all sense of time and place, including what is real and not real. In desperation, her husband admits her to a nearby psychiatric hospital, where she begins the hard work of rebuilding her identity. In this unwaveringly honest, insightful, and often shocking memoir Catherine reconstructs her sense of self, starting with her childhood as the daughter of Korean immigrants, moving through a traumatic past relationship, and on to the early years of her courtship with and marriage to her husband, James. She masterfully interweaves these parts of her past with a vivid, immediate recounting of the days she spent in the ward. The result is a powerful exploration of psychosis and motherhood, at once intensely personal, yet holding within it a universal experience – of how we love, live and understand ourselves in relation to each other.

Surrounded By Madness

Author: Rachel Pruchno
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781087912950
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Book Description
"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. As a child, she didn't understand her mother's episodes of crippling sadness or whirlwind activity. As a mother, she feared her daughter Sophie would follow in the footsteps of the grandmother Sophie never knew. Unraveling the mysteries of her mother's and daughter's illnesses, Pruchno fought to preserve her marriage and protect her son. But it was not until she came to terms with her own secrets that she truly understood the destructive and pervasive effects mental illness has on families. Surrounded By Madness is transforming. It will empower families to stop hiding and start talking when mental illness strikes.

Snow Falling on Cedars

Author: David Guterson
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780151001002
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Book Description
A powerful tale of the Pacific Northwest in the 1950s, reminiscent of To Kill a Mockingbird. Courtroom drama, love story, and war novel, this is the epic tale of a young Japanese-American and the man on trial for killing the man she loves.