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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The Dark Side of Innocence: Growing Up Bipolar

Terri Cheney

Louder Than Words: A Mother's Journey in Healing Autism

Jenny McCarthy · 213 pages

The remarkable story of one mother's fight to 'heal' her autistic son.On the morning Jenny McCarthy discovered her two-year-old son Evan having a seizure, her life turned upside down. From being the mother of an average toddler she was suddenly thrown into a world of turmoil. As doctor after doctor misdiagnosed his symptoms, Evan suffered many harrowing, life-threatening episodes. Then, one amazin

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

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.

Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke

Patty Duke, Kenneth Turan · 311 pages

The Bipolar Disorder Survival Guide: What You and Your Family Need to Know

David J. Miklowitz

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

Welcome to the Jungle: Everything You Wanted to Know about Bipolar But Were Too Freaked Out to Ask

Hilary T. Smith

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

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

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.

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

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

Sometimes Amazing Things Happen: Heartbreak and Hope on the Bellevue Hospital Psychiatric Prison Ward

Elizabeth Ford · 272 pages

Welcome to the Bellevue Hospital Psychiatric Prison Ward, a maximum-security hospital and inpatient psychiatric unit for the inmates of the New York City jail system, with its hub on Rikers Island. It is a world of heartbreak, violence, and pain, where severely ill men are often lost in a tangle of courts, jails, and bureaucracy. It is also a place of challenges, redemption, and surprising joy, wh

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

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

Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America

Robert Whitaker · 379 pages

In this astonishing and startling book, award-winning science and history writer Robert Whitaker investigates a medical mystery: Why has the number of disabled mentally ill in the United States tripled over the past two decades? Every day, 1,100 adults and children are added to the government disability rolls because they have become newly disabled by mental illness, with this epidemic spreading m