The Dark Side of Innocence: Growing Up Bipolar

Changing My Mind

Margaret Trudeau · 382 pages

"In this deeply moving memoir, Margaret Trudeau speaks with candour and insight about the illness that silently shaped her life -- a life lived often in turbulence and in the public's fascination. Plagued since childhood by extreme moods, Margaret was ill-prepared for the high-profile role into which she was cast at age twenty-two, as Canada's youngest first lady. Captivated by her high spirits, y

My Lovely Wife in the Psych Ward

Mark Lukach · 320 pages

"A heart-wrenching, yet hopeful, memoir of a young marriage that is redefined by mental illness and affirms the power of love. Mark and Giulia's life together began as a storybook romance. The fell in love at eighteen, married at twenty-four, and were living their dream life in San Francisco. When Giulia was twenty-seven, she suffered a terrifying and unexpected psychotic break that landed her in

Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl

Stacy Pershall · 232 pages

Stacy Pershall grew up depressed and too smart for her own good, a deeply strange girl in Prairie Grove, Arkansas (population 1,000), where the prevailing wisdom was that Jesus healed all. From her days as a thirteen-year-old Jesus freak, through a battle with anorexia and bulimia, her first manic episode at eighteen, and the eventual diagnosis of bipolar disorder and borderline personality disord

Haldol and Hyacinths: A Bipolar Life

Melody Moezzi · 288 pages

"With candor and humor, a manic-depressive Iranian-American Muslim woman chronicles her experiences with both clinical and cultural bipolarity. Melody Moezzi was born to Persian parents at the height of the Islamic Revolution and raised amid a vibrant, loving, and gossipy Iranian diaspora in the American heartland. When at eighteen, she began battling a severe physical illness, her community stepp

My Body Is a Book of Rules

Elissa Washuta · 189 pages

As Elissa Washuta makes the transition from college kid to independent adult, she finds herself overwhelmed by the calamities piling up in her brain. When her mood-stabilizing medications aren't threatening her life, they're shoving her from depression to mania and back in the space of an hour. Her crisis of American Indian identity bleeds into other areas of self-doubt; mental illness, sexual tra

An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

Kay Redfield Jamison · 223 pages

From Kay Redfield Jamison - an international authority on manic-depressive illness, and one of the few women who are full professors of medicine at American universities - a remarkable personal testimony: the revelation of her own struggle since adolescence with manic-depression, and how it has shaped her life. Vividly, directly, with candor, wit, and simplicity, she takes us into the fascinating

Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke

Patty Duke, Kenneth Turan · 311 pages

Daughter of the Queen of Sheba

Jacki Lyden · 258 pages

As a foreign correspondent for National Public Radio, Jacki Lyden has spent her adult life on the frontlines in some of the most dangerous war zones in the world. Her childhood was a war zone of a different kind. Her mother suffered from what we now call manic-depression; when Jacki was a child in a small midwestern town, her mother was simply called crazy. Jacki would return home from grade scho

Lab Girl

Hope Jahren · 408 pages

An illuminating debut memoir of a woman in science; a moving portrait of a longtime friendship; and a stunningly fresh look at plants that will forever change how you see the natural world Acclaimed scientist Hope Jahren has built three laboratories in which she’s studied trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. Her first book is a revelatory treatise on plant life—but it is also so much more. Lab

Wishful Drinking

Carrie Fisher · 163 pages

Fisher comes clean (well, sort of) with the crazy truth that is her life, in her first-ever memoir.

Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So

Mark Vonnegut · 203 pages

More than thirty years after the publication of his acclaimed memoir The Eden Express, Mark Vonnegut continues his remarkable story in this searingly funny, iconoclastic account of coping with mental illness, finding his calling as a pediatrician, and learning that willpower isn't nearly enough. Here is the world after Mark was released from a mental hospital to find his family forever altered. Af

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

Liar

Rob Roberge · 255 pages

"A darkly funny, intense memoir about mental illness, memory and storytelling, from an acclaimed novelist. When Rob Roberge learns that he's likely to have developed a progressive memory-eroding disease from years of hard living and frequent concussions, he is terrified by the prospect of becoming a walking shadow. In a desperate attempt to preserve his identity, he sets out to (somewhat faithfull

Hurry Down Sunshine: A Memoir

Michael Greenberg · 234 pages

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.

Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo and Me

Ellen Forney · 256 pages

One of the best memoirs on mental illness. It contains specifics about mania, depression, and bipolar disorder and how brutally numbing depression can be, the dangerous hives of mania and what it is like to undergo therapy and receive medication.

Fast Girl: A Life Spent Running from Madness

Suzy Favor Hamilton, Sarah Tomlinson · 304 pages

During the 1990s, three-time Olympian Suzy Favor Hamilton was the darling of American track and field. An outstanding runner, a major sports apparel spokesperson, and a happily married wife, she was the model for an active, healthy, and wholesome life. But her perfect facade masked a dark truth: manic depression and bipolar disorder that drove her obsession to perform and win. For years after leav

A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life

Ayelet Waldman · 242 pages

"In an effort to treat a debilitating mood disorder, Ayelet Waldman undertook a very private experiment, ingesting 10 micrograms of LSD every three days for a month. This is the story--by turns revealing, courageous, fascinating and funny--of her quietly psychedelic spring, her quest to understand one of our most feared drugs, and her search for a really good day"--

Stop Pretending: What Happened When My Big Sister Went Crazy

Sonya Sones · 159 pages

A younger sister has a difficult time adjusting to life after her older sister has a mental breakdown.

Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table

Ruth Reichl · 294 pages

For better or worse, almost all of us grow up at the table. It is in this setting that Ruth Reichl's brilliantly written memoir takes its form. For, at a very early age, Reichl discovered that "food could be a way of making sense of the world . . . if you watched people as they ate, you could find out who they were." Tender at the Bone is the story of a life determined, enhanced, and defined in eq

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

Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

Marya Hornbacher · 301 pages

Why would a talented young girl go through the looking glass and step into a netherworld where up is down and food is greed, where death is honor and flesh is weak? Why enter into a love affair with hunger, drugs, sex, and death? Marya Hornbacher sustains both anorexia and bulimia through five lengthy hospitalizations, endless therapy, and the loss of family, friends, jobs, and ultimately, any sen

Memoirs of My Nervous Illness

Daniel Paul Schreber · 500 pages

The Half of It: A Memoir

Madison Beer · 176 pages

Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir

Jenny Lawson · 318 pages

When Jenny Lawson was little, all she ever wanted was to fit in. That dream was cut short by her fantastically unbalanced father and a morbidly eccentric childhood. It did, however, open up an opportunity for Lawson to find the humor in the strange shame-spiral that is her life, and we are all the better for it. In the irreverent Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Lawson’s long-suffering husban