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The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic
Darby Penney, Peter Stastny · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
Simon Winchester · 265 pages
Women of the Asylum
Jeffrey L. Geller · 366 pages
Jeffrey Geller and Maxine Harris have amassed twenty-six first person accounts of women who were placed in mental institutions against their will, often by male family members for holding views or behaving in ways that deviated from the norms of their day. Taken as a whole, these pieces offer a fascinating and frightening portrait of life both behind and outside the asylum walls. Geller and Harri
The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
Jon Ronson · 275 pages
"In this madcap journey, a bestselling journalist investigates psychopaths and the industry of doctors, scientists, and everyone else who studies them. The Psychopath Test is a fascinating journey through the minds of madness. Jon Ronson's exploration of a potential hoax being played on the world's top neurologists takes him, unexpectedly, into the heart of the madness industry. An influential psy
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
Michel Foucault · 299 pages
Bedlam: London and its Mad
Catharine Arnold · 313 pages
Catharine Arnold takes us on a tour of Bedlam and examines London's attitude to madness along the way. We travel through the ages, from the barbaric `exorcisms' of the medieval period to the Tudor belief that a roast mouse, eaten whole, was the cure. We see the reforming zeal of eighteenth century campaigners and the development of the massive Victorian asylums. This was the era of the private mad
Broadmoor Revealed: Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum
Mark Stevens · 192 pages
Weekends at Bellevue: Nine Years on the Night Shift at the Psych E.R.
Julie Holland · 310 pages
Documents a psychiatrist's employment at New York City's Bellevue Hospital while sharing the life lessons she learned from her patients and colleagues, describing some of the more remarkable cases of her career and their influences on her family life.
A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness
S. Nassir Ghaemi · 340 pages
An investigation into the surprisingly deep correlation between mental illness and successful leadership, as seen through some of history's greatest politicians, generals, and businesspeople. "A First-Rate Madness," Nassir Ghaemi, who runs the Mood Disorders Program at Tufts University Medical Center, draws from the careers and personal plights of such notable leaders as Lincoln, Churchill, Gandh
Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case
Debbie Nathan · 297 pages
The true story of the three women behind Sybil, the famous multiple-personality case.
Annie's Ghosts: A Journey Into a Family Secret
Steve Luxenberg · 401 pages
Beth Luxenberg was an only child. Everyone knew it: her grown children, her friends, even people she’d only recently met. So when her secret emerged, her son Steve Luxenberg was bewildered. He was certain that his mother had no siblings, just as he knew that her name was Beth, and that she had raised her children, above all, to tell the truth.By then, Beth was nearly eighty, and in fragile health.
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Siddhartha Mukherjee · 571 pages
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer is a book written by Siddhartha Mukherjee, an Indian-born American physician and oncologist. Published on 16 November 2010 by Scribner, it won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction.
A Beautiful Mind
Sylvia Nasar · 460 pages
Relates how mathematical genius John Forbes Nash, Jr., suffered a breakdown at age thirty-one and was diagnosed with schizophrenia, but experienced a remission of his illness thirty years later.
The Last Time I Wore a Dress
Daphne Scholinski, Jane Meredith Adams · 211 pages
Placed in a mental hospital at age fifteen after being diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder, an author shares her harrowing ordeal in the hopes that other teenagers will not suffer as she did due to a lack of understanding of sexual orientation.
Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness
Susannah Cahalan · 288 pages
The book narrates Cahalan's issues with anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis and the process by which she was diagnosed with this form of encephalitis. She wakes up in a hospital with no memory of the events of the previous month, during which time she would have violent episodes and delusions. Her eventual diagnosis is made more difficult by various physicians misdiagnosing her with several theories s
In a Different Key: The Story of Autism
John Donvan, Caren Zucker · 670 pages
"Nearly seventy-five years ago, Donald Triplett of Forest, Mississippi, became the first child diagnosed with autism. Beginning with his family's odyssey, In a Different Key tells the extraordinary story of this often misunderstood condition, and of the civil rights battles waged by the families of those who have it. Unfolding over decades, it is a beautifully rendered history of ordinary people d
Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill
Robert Whitaker · 341 pages
In Mad in America, medical journalist Robert Whitaker reveals an astounding truth: Schizophrenics in the United States currently fare worse than patients in the world's poorest countries, and quite possibly worse than asylum patients did in the early nineteenth century. With a muckraker's passion, Whitaker argues that modern treatments for the severely mentally ill are just old medicine in new bot
Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present
Lisa Appignanesi · 584 pages
Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities
Flora Rheta Schreiber · 460 pages
This is the amazing story of a woman who lived with 16 different personalities. Here is the unbelievable yet true story of Sybil Dorsett, a survivor of terrible childhood abuse who as an adult was a victim of sudden and mysterious blackouts. What happened during those blackouts has made Sybil's experience one of the most famous psychological cases in the world.
Ten Days in a Mad-House
Nellie Bly · 97 pages
In the 1800s, journalist Nellie Bly pretended to be mentally ill and spent 10 days in an insane asylum in order to report on conditions and abuses there.
Prozac Nation
Elizabeth Wurtzel · 336 pages
Full of promise is how anyone would have described Elizabeth Wurtzel at age ten, a bright-eyed little girl who painted, wrote stories, and excelled in every way. By twelve she was cutting her legs in the girls' bathroom and listening to scratchy recordings of the Velvet Underground. College was marked by a series of breakdowns, suicide attempts, and hospitalizations before she was finally given P
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
Oliver Sacks · 243 pages
In his most extraordinary book, “one of the great clinical writers of the twentieth century” (The New York Times) recounts the case histories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders. Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who
Cut
Patricia McCormick · 160 pages
While confined to a mental hospital, thirteen-year-old Callie slowly comes to understand some of the reasons behind her self-mutilation, and gradually starts to get better.