Author: Kate Richards Publisher: Penguin Group Australia ISBN: 1742535623 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 289
Book Description
Winner of the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature 2014 nonfiction prize. Shortlisted for the Queensland Literary Awards 2013 nonficiton prize. It's not every day you get to admit you're mad. The thing with psychosis is that when I'm sick I believe the delusional stuff to the same degree that you might know the sky is above and the earth below. And if someone were to say to me that the delusional thinking is, in fact, delusional, well that's the same as if I assure you now that we walk on the sky. Of course you wouldn't believe me, and that's why it's sometimes so hard for people who are sick like this to know that they need treatment. Psychosis and severe depression have a huge effect on how you relate to other people and how you see the world. It's a bit like being in a vacuum, or behind a wall of really thick glass . . . you lose any sense of connectedness. You're cast adrift from everyone and everything that matters. I've lived with acute psychosis and depression for the best part of twenty years. This is the story of my journey from chaos to balance, and from limbo to meaning. Kate Richards is a trained doctor currently working in medical research. 'Demands to be read' Sunday Age 'Heart wrenching, mind bending' Daily Telegraph 'A mysteriously beautiful book' Michael McGirr, The Age 'A gifted writer and storyteller' Courier-Mail 'Astonishing' Herald Sun
Author: Anne Roiphe Publisher: Anchor ISBN: 0307473961 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 242
Book Description
Coming of age on Park Avenue in the 1950s, Anne Roiphe had an adolescence entrenched in privilege, petticoats, and social rules. Young women at the time were expected to give up personal freedom for devotion to home and children. Instead, Roiphe chose Beckett, Proust, Sartre, and Mann as her heroes, and became one of the girls draped across the sofa at parties with George Plimpton, Norman Mailer, and William Styron, sometimes with her young child in tow. For a time she was satisfied to play the muse, but at the age of twenty-seven, divorced and finally freed of the notion that any sacrifice was worth making for art, she began to write. Here, in her clear-sighted, perceptive, and unabashed memoir, Roiphe shares with astonishing honesty the tumultuous adventure of self-discovery that finally led to her redemption.
Author: Susanna Kaysen Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 0804151113 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 194
Book Description
30th ANNIVERSARY EDITION • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she'd never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital. Her memoir of the next two years is a "poignant, honest ... triumphantly funny ... and heartbreaking story" (The New York Times Book Review). WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR The ward for teenage girls in the McLean psychiatric hospital was as renowned for its famous clientele—Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles—as for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary. Kaysen's memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. It is a brilliant evocation of a "parallel universe" set within the kaleidoscopically shifting landscape of the late sixties. Girl, Interrupted is a clear-sighted, unflinching document that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.
Author: Mary O'Hagan Publisher: Openbox ISBN: 9780473279806 Category : Mentally ill Languages : en Pages : 262
Book Description
After her journey through madness Mary O'Hagan realised the mental health system and society did more harm than good. 'Madness Made Me' is a myth-busting account of madness and our customary responses to it through the lens of lived experience. O'Hagan's journey took her from the psychiatric hospital to the United Nations and many places in between as a leader in the international mad movement. Her fundamental message is that madness is profoundly disruptive but full human experience. The trouble is most people don't see it that way, from the experts who make up clever theories about brain disease to the people down the road who have irrational fears about mad axe-murderers. 'Madness Made Me' is a compelling and beautifully written book that uncovers widespread injustice. It ends with vision for a world that holds hope for people with mental distress and treats them with respect and humanity.
Author: Salman Rashid Publisher: Rupa Publications ISBN: 9789384067366 Category : Crafts & Hobbies Languages : en Pages : 134
Book Description
During the chaos of partition in 1947, something dreadful happened in the city of Jalandhar in Punjab. As a result of this, Salman Rashid's family fled Jalandhar for Pakistan, the newly created country across the border. They were among the nearly two million people uprooted from their homes in the greatest transmigration in history. Besides those who fled, other members of the family became part of a grimmer statistic: They featured among the more than one million unfortunate souls who paid with their lives for the division of India and creation of Pakistan. After living in the shadow of his family's tragedy for decades, in 2008, Rashid made the journey back to his ancestral village to uncover the truth. A time of madness tells the story of what he discovered with great poignancy and grace. It is a tale of unspeakable brutality but it is also a testament to the uniquely human traits of forgiveness, redemption and the resilience of the human spirit.
Author: Catherine Cho Publisher: Henry Holt and Company ISBN: 1250623707 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 240
Book Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice "Inferno is a disturbing and masterfully told memoir, but it’s also an important one that pushes back against powerful taboos. . ." --The New York Times Book Review "Explosive" --Good Morning America "Sublime" --Bookpage (starred review) When Catherine Cho and her husband set off from London to introduce their newborn son to family scattered across the United States, she could not have imagined what lay in store. Before the trip’s end, she develops psychosis, a complete break from reality, which causes her to lose all sense of time and place, including what is real and not real. In desperation, her husband admits her to a nearby psychiatric hospital, where she begins the hard work of rebuilding her identity. In this unwaveringly honest, insightful, and often shocking memoir Catherine reconstructs her sense of self, starting with her childhood as the daughter of Korean immigrants, moving through a traumatic past relationship, and on to the early years of her courtship with and marriage to her husband, James. She masterfully interweaves these parts of her past with a vivid, immediate recounting of the days she spent in the ward. The result is a powerful exploration of psychosis and motherhood, at once intensely personal, yet holding within it a universal experience – of how we love, live and understand ourselves in relation to each other.
Author: Sol Wachtler Publisher: Open Road Media ISBN: 1480495751 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 308
Book Description
Driving down the Long Island Expressway in November of 1992, Sol Wachtler was New York’s chief judge and heir apparent to the New York governorship. Suddenly, three van loads of FBI agents swerved in front of him—bringing his car and his legal career to a halt. Wachtler's subsequent arrest, conviction, and incarceration for harassing his longtime lover precipitated a media feeding frenzy, revealing to the world his struggles with romantic attachment, manic depression, and drug abuse. In this, his prison diary, Wachtler reveals the stark reality behind his vertiginous fall from the heights of the legal establishment to the underbelly of the criminal justice system. Sentenced to a medium security prison in Butner, North Carolina, Wachtler is stabbed by an unseen assailant, berated by prison guards, and repeatedly placed in solitary confinement with no explanation. Moreover, as a prisoner he confronts firsthand the inequities of a system his judicial rulings helped to construct and befriends the type of people he once sentenced. With unflinching honesty, Wachtler draws on his unique experience of living life on both sides of the bench to paint a chilling portrait of prison life interwoven with a no‐holds‐barred analysis of the shortcomings of the American legal justice system.
Author: James Rhodes Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: 1632866986 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 226
Book Description
"An intense, eloquent, and appropriately furious memoir with the transporting beauty of classical music . . . The cumulative effect of the literary concert [Rhodes] gives in these pages is transcendence, both for him and for the reader." --Los Angeles Review of Books “A mesmeric combination of vivid, keen, obsessive precision and raw, urgent energy.” --Zoe Williams, The Guardian James Rhodes's passion for music has been his lifeline--the thread that has held through a life encompassing abuse and turmoil. But whether listening to Rachmaninov on a loop as a traumatized teenager or discovering a Bach adagio while in a hospital ward, he survived his demons by encounters with musical miracles. These--along with a chance encounter with a stranger--inspired him to become the renowned concert pianist he is today. Instrumental is a memoir like no other: unapologetically candid, boldly outspoken, and surprisingly funny--shot through with a mordant wit, even in its darkest moments. A feature film adaptation of Rhodes's incredible story is now in development from Monumental Pictures and BBC Films, following a competitive bidding war involving major U.S. and U.K. companies. An impassioned tribute to the therapeutic powers of music, Instrumental also weaves in fascinating facts about how classical music actually works and about the extraordinary lives of some of the great composers. It explains why and how music has the potential to transform all of our lives.
Author: Zack McDermott Publisher: Little, Brown ISBN: 0316315117 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
*Soon to be an HBO limited series* "Glorious...one of the best memoirs I've read in years...a tragicomic gem about family, class, race, justice, and the spectacular weirdness of Wichita. [McDermott] can move from barely controlled hilarity to the brink of rage to aching tenderness in a single breath."--Marya Hornbacher, New York Times Book Review Zack McDermott, a 26-year-old Brooklyn public defender, woke up one morning convinced he was being filmed, Truman Show-style, as part of an audition for a TV pilot. Every passerby was an actor; every car would magically stop for him; everything he saw was a cue from "The Producer" to help inspire the performance of a lifetime. After a manic spree around Manhattan, Zack, who is bipolar, was arrested on a subway platform and admitted to Bellevue Hospital. So begins the story of Zack's freefall into psychosis and his desperate, poignant, often hilarious struggle to claw his way back to sanity. It's a journey that will take him from New York City back to his Kansas roots and to the one person who might be able to save him, his tough, big-hearted Midwestern mother, nicknamed the Bird, whose fierce and steadfast love is the light in Zack's dark world. Before his odyssey is over, Zack will be tackled by guards in mental wards, run naked through cornfields, receive secret messages from the TV, befriend a former Navy Seal and his talking stuffed monkey, and see the Virgin Mary in the whorls of his own back hair. But with the Bird's help, he just might have a shot at pulling through, starting over, and maybe even meeting a partner who can love him back, bipolar and all. Introducing an electrifying new voice, GORILLA AND THE BIRD is a raw and unforgettable account of a young man's unraveling and the relationship that saves him.
Author: Barbara Taylor Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022627392X Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 316
Book Description
In the late 1970s, Barbara Taylor, then an acclaimed young historian, began to suffer from severe anxiety. In the years that followed, Taylor's world contracted around her illness. Eventually, she was admitted to what had once been England's largest psychiatric institutions, the infamous Friern Mental Hospital in London
Author: Kate Richards
Author: Anne Roiphe
Author: Susanna Kaysen
Author: Mary O'Hagan
Author: Salman Rashid
Author: Catherine Cho
Author: Sol Wachtler
Author: James Rhodes
Author: Zack McDermott
Author: Barbara Taylor