Mental Health Memoirs
Read these books for first-hand insight into the experience and realities of living with mental illness.
A body made of glass : a cultural history of hypochondria
Crampton, Caroline, author
2024
Caroline Crampton's life was upended at the age of seventeen, when she was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma. After years of invasive treatment, she was finally given the all clear. But being cured of the cancer didn't mean she now felt well. Crampton has drawn from her own experiences with health anxiety to write a revelatory exploration of hypochondria. She deftly weaves together history, memoir, and literary criticism to make sense of this invisible and undercovered sickness - revealing the far-reaching impact of health anxiety on our physical, mental, and emotional health.
Cheer the f**k up : how to save your best friend
Rooke, Jack.
2020
This is a bold, brilliant and very personal account of a young comedian's experiences with mental health. An ode to the importance of friendship, Jack Rooke takes us on a mission to better understand the reasons why so many people are struggling, and how we can all feel better equipped in knowing how to support that one friend we might be that bit more worried about. Part comedic memoir, part advice guide, this book is a fresh and timely take on a huge issue very close to Jack's heart - in 2015, while working as an ambassador for a male mental health charity, he lost one of his best friends to suicide. Taking you on a journey through his life and experiences with grief, sexuality, depression and more, Jack offers his own frank and powerful advice on how best to have meaningful conversations about a loved one's state of mind. Hilarious and heart-breaking in equal measure, this book will definitely make you laugh and might just make you cry, but it could also help save a life.
Heart berries : a memoir
Mailhot, Terese Marie, author
2018
Guileless and refreshingly honest, Terese Mailhot's debut memoir chronicles her struggle to balance the beauty of her Native heritage with the often desperate and chaotic reality of life on the reservation. Hometown: The Seabird Island Band, B.C.
Madness : race and insanity in a Jim Crow asylum
Hylton, Antonia, author
2024
"On a cold day in March of 1911, officials marched twelve Black men into the heart of a forest in Maryland. Under the supervision of a doctor, the men were forced to clear the land, pour cement, lay bricks, and harvest tobacco. When construction finished, they became the first twelve patients of the state's Hospital for the Negro Insane. For centuries, Black patients have been absent from our history books. Madness transports readers behind the brick walls of a Jim Crow asylum. In Madness, Peabody and Emmy award-winning journalist Antonia Hylton tells the 93-year-old history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the last segregated asylums with surviving records and a campus that still stands to this day in Anne Arundel County, Maryland. She blends the intimate tales of patients and employees whose lives were shaped by Crownsville with a decade-worth of investigative research and archival documents. Madness chronicles the stories of Black families whose mental health suffered as they tried, and sometimes failed, to find safety and dignity. Hylton also grapples with her own family's experiences with mental illness, and the secrecy and shame that it reproduced for generations. As Crownsville Hospital grew from an antebellum-style work camp to a tiny city sitting on 1,500 acres, the institution became a microcosm of America's evolving battles over slavery, racial integration, and civil rights. During its peak years, the hospital's wards were overflowing with almost 2,700 patients. By the end of the 20th-century, the asylum faded from view as prisons and jails became America's new focus. In Madness, Hylton traces the legacy of slavery to the treatment of Black people's bodies and minds in our current mental healthcare system. It is a captivating and heartbreaking meditation on how America decides who is sick or criminal, and who is worthy of our care or irredeemable"-- Provided by publisher.
Manic : a memoir
Cheney, Terri, 1959-
2008
On the outside, Terri Cheney was a successful, attractive Beverly Hills entertainment lawyer. But behind her seemingly flawless façade lay a dangerous secret--for most of her life Cheney had been battling bipolar disorder and concealing a pharmacy's worth of prescriptions meant to make her "normal."
Maybe you should talk to someone : a therapist, her therapist, and our lives revealed
Gottlieb, Lori, author
2019
Mind on fire : a memoir of madness and recovery
Fanning, Arnold Thomas, author.
2019
Arnold Thomas Fanning had his first experience of depression during adolescence, following the death of his mother. Some ten years later, an up-and-coming playwright, he was overcome by mania and delusions. Thus began a terrible period in which he was often suicidal, increasingly disconnected from family and friends, sometimes in trouble with the law, and homeless in London. Drawing on his own memories, the recollections of people who knew him when he was at his worst, and medical and police records, Arnold Thomas Fanning has produced a beautifully written, devastatingly intense account of madness - and recovery.
The neuroscientist who lost her mind : my tale of madness and recovery
Lipska, Barbara K., author
2018
Notes on a nervous planet
Haig, Matt, 1975- author
2019
A look at how modern life feeds our anxiety, and how to live a better life. The societies we live in are increasingly making our minds ill, making it feel as though the way we live is engineered to make us unhappy. When Matt Haig developed panic disorder, anxiety, and depression as an adult, it took him a long time to work out the ways the external world could impact his mental health in both positive and negative ways. Notes on a Nervous Planet collects his observations, taking a look at how the various social, commercial and technological "advancements" that have created the world we now live in can actually hinder our happiness. Haig examines everything from broader phenomena like inequality, social media, and the news; to things closer to our daily lives, like how we sleep, how we exercise, and even the distinction we draw between our minds and our bodies.
The other side of silence : a psychiatrist's memoir of depression
Gask, Linda.
2015
Having spent her life trying to patch up the souls of others, psychiatrist Linda Gask eventually learnt to focus on her own depression and take care of herself, too. Artfully crafted and told with warmth and honesty, this is the story of Linda's journey, interwoven with insights into her patients' diverse experiences of depression.
Strangers to ourselves : unsettled minds and the stories that make us
Aviv, Rachel, author
2022
Rachel Aviv writes about how explanations for mental distress may shape our health, our sense of who we are, and the possibilities for who we can be in the world. Drawing on deep, original reporting and unpublished journals and memoirs, they converge in the psychic hinterlands, the outer edges of human experience. Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations and endeavor to recover a sense of agency, in search of new ways to understand a self in the world.
While you were out : an intimate family portrait of mental illness in an era of silence
Kissinger, Meg, author
2023
Growing up in the 1960s in the suburbs of Chicago, Meg Kissinger's family seemed to live a charmed life. But behind closed doors, a harsher reality was unfolding. So begins the personal story of one family's struggles, then opens outward as Kissinger details how childhood tragedy catalyzed a journalism career focused on exposing our country's flawed mental health care. Kissinger explores the consequences of shame, the havoc of botched public policy, and the hope offered by new treatment strategies.