Biography childhood mental illness awareness

In a captivating style often belying her past as a poet, Ikpi shares her journey from her childhood in Nigeria, to immigrating to the United States, and her struggles with relationships and a slow unraveling that results in a hospital stay. Often switching into second and third person, she offers a vivid portrayal of a hypomania, depression, bipolar II and anxiety.

Ikpi shares the ongoing ways her mental health issues pervade her everyday life, sometimes minute by minute, to instill in biographies childhood mental illness awareness their around-the-clock nature and the perniciousness of her anxious insomniac hours, as well as the challenges of finding medication whose side effects are tolerable.

Related: 12 Powerful Books About Depression. Want more great books? Sign up for the Early Bird Books newsletter and get the best daily ebook deals delivered straight to your inbox. Katherine Ellison offers a different kind of tale. Related: 10 Moving Biographies and Memoirs. She manages to turn often dark situations into something comic yet relatable, but also speaks plainly to the direness of the healthcare system with an open letter to her insurance company, pleading for them to cover the medication she needs to stay alive.

Award-winning journalist Rachel Aviv combines personal memoir with the experiences of others in this acclaimed exploration of mental illness and how moments of crisis shape our perception of ourselves. The result is a movingly complex approach to the mental illness memoir. Elyn R. Saks is a renowned lawyer, professor, and psychiatrist. She has also suffered from schizophrenia for most of her life.

She also relates how she learned to live with her disease and overcame obstacles to thrive in her field of work. Throughout her fascinating and moving memoirthe author eloquently challenges cultural assumptions about mental illness and offers hope for others who are navigating profoundly difficult diagnoses. Then she finds Dr. Rosen and his group therapy sessions.

Brimming with candor and humor, Group offers an insightful look at group therapy and connecting with others on the road to recovery. After dealing with self-doubt, anxiety, and depression, Baek Sehee starts seeing a psychiatrist. She also starts recording their sessions and expanding upon her progress in short, reflective essays. Through both her sessions and her own writing, the author starts to understand her self-defeating cycles of harmful behavior and begins taking the steps necessary for change.

Subscribe to get articles about writing, adding to your TBR pile, and simply content we feel is worth sharing. And yes, also sign up to be the first to hear about giveaways, our acquisitions, and exclusives! Step 1 of 8. By Stephanie Brown. These illuminating narratives shine through the darkness. While You Were Out. By Meg Kissinger. Her bewilderment about this sudden loss of control is magnified by the intensity of her feelings for Nico, a French soldier she met in Port-au-Prince and with whom she connected instantly and deeply.

With inspiring fearlessness, McClelland tackles perhaps her most harrowing assignment to date: investigating the damage in her own mind and repairing her broken psyche. McClelland discovers she is far from alone: while we frequently associate PTSD with wartime combat, it is more often caused by other manner of trauma and can even be contagious-close proximity to those afflicted can trigger its symptoms.

As she confronts the realities of her diagnosis, she opens up to the love that seems to have found her at an inopportune moment. At the late age of twenty-eight and after nineteen rejections, he is finally accepted to Harvard Medical School, where he gains purpose, a life, and some control over his condition. There are the manic episodes, during which he felt burdened with saving the world, juxtaposed against the real-world responsibilities of running a pediatric practice.

Ultimately a tribute to the small, daily, and positive parts of a life interrupted by bipolar disorder, Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So is a wise, unsentimental, and inspiring book that will resonate with generations of readers. In the beginning it was germs and food. But Bob had lived a hermetic life in a remote part of California for longer than Sandy had been alive, and what little Sandy knew of him came from rare family reunions or odd, infrequent phone calls.

Then in Bob mailed Sandy his autobiography. 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. Her body was a canvas of cruelty; each scar a mark of pride and shame. In sharp and shocking language, Lights On, Rats Out brings us closely into these years.

The heady thrill of meeting with her psychiatrist, Dr. Adam N. She drinks herself into the same numbness that nearly devoured her charismatic but troubled mother, reaching the brink of suicide. Lit is about getting drunk and getting sober, becoming a mother by letting go of a mother, learning to write by learning to live. The perspectives of his three children, his spouse, and his own distorted reality combine to offer readers a glimpse of a world that will either feel hauntingly familiar or mind-boggling.

Losing Dad poignantly shows the effects of inadequate treatment for those living with a severe mental illness in America. In this riveting and intimate blend of science, history, and memoir, Adam explores the weird thoughts that exist within every mind and explains how they drive millions of us toward obsession and compulsion. In bursts of prose that mirror the devastating highs and extreme lows of her illness, Cheney describes her roller-coaster life with shocking honesty—from glamorous parties to a night in jail; from flying fourteen kites off the edge of a cliff in a thunderstorm to crying beneath her office desk; from electroshock therapy to a suicide attempt fueled by tequila and prescription painkillers.

With ManicCheney gives voice to the unarticulated madness she endured. In this way the reader is able to viscerally experience the incredible speeding highs of mania and the crushing blows of depression, just as Cheney did. Manic does not simply explain bipolar disorder—it takes us in its grasp and does not let go. Flagrantly manic and terrified that medications would cause her to lose creativity, she began a years-long struggle to find mental stability while retaining her passions and creativity.

Blending radical formal fluidity and caustic humor, Gurba takes on sexual violence, small towns, and race, turning what might be tragic into piercing, revealing comedy. This is a confident, intoxicating, brassy book that takes the cost of sexual assault, racism, misogyny, and homophobia deadly seriously. 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. 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.

Mental is eye-opening and powerful, tackling an illness and drug that has touched millions of lives and yet remains shrouded in social stigma. Stossel offers an intimate and authoritative history of efforts by scientists, philosophers, and writers to understand anxiety. He also explores how individual sufferers—including himself—have managed and controlled symptoms.

By turns erudite and compassionate, amusing and inspirational, My Age of Anxiety is the essential account of a pervasive and too often misunderstood affliction. Her biography childhood mental illness awareness of American Indian identity bleeds into other areas of self-doubt; mental illness, sexual trauma, ethnic identity, and independence become intertwined.

Built on the bones of fundamental identity questions as contorted by a distressed brain, My Body Is a Book of Rules pulls no punches in its self-deprecating and ferocious look at human fallibility. Drawing on his own struggles with the illness and interviews with fellow sufferers, doctors and scientists, policy makers and politicians, drug designers, and philosophers, Andrew Solomon reveals the subtle complexities and sheer agony of the disease as well as the reasons for hope.

He confronts the challenge of defining the illness and describes the vast range of available medications and treatments, and the impact the malady has on various demographic populations—around the world and throughout history. He also explores the thorny patch of moral and ethical questions posed by biological explanations for mental illness.

Boys Don't Cry by Tim Grayburn. Meet Tim. For nearly a decade Tim kept his depression secret. It made him feel so weak and shameful he thought it would destroy his whole life if anyone found out.

Biography childhood mental illness awareness

But an unexpected discovery by a loved one forced him to confront his illness and realise there was strength to be found in sharing his story with others. Throughout the course of this powerful narrative, depression's universal themes come to light, among them, struggles with identity, lack of understanding of the symptoms, the challenges of work-life, self-medicating, the fallout of the disease in the lives of our loved ones, the tragedy of suicide, and the hereditary aspects of the disease.

The Hilarious World of Depression illuminates depression in an entirely fresh and inspiring way. Brave Girl Eating by Harriet Brown. One of the most up to date, relevant, and honest accounts of one family's battle with the life threatening challenges of anorexia.