My passion for mental health is both personal and professional. I have Bipolar Disorder, and I am a law professor who teaches and researches in this area. The books on this list go deeper than the usual narrative of mental illness, telling inspiring success stories and laying bare the dysfunctions of our current approach to mental illness. I have found in these books comfort and motivation to push for change.
I wrote...
Through the Fire: How People with Mental Illness Are Empowering Each Other
Her riveting memoir takes the reader inside the mind of a person who has achieved great personal and professional success while living with schizophrenia. The descriptions of psychosis and psychiatric hospitalization ring true to my own experiences.
I found hope and inspiration from Professor Sak’s remarkable life story, but the book may be even more important for someone who hasn’t experienced psychosis and wonders what it’s like.
Elyn Saks is Professor of Law and Psychiatry at University of Southern California Law School. She's the author of several books. Happily married. And - a schizophrenic. Saks lifts the veil on schizophrenia with her startling and honest account of how she learned to live with this debilitating disease. With a coolly clear, measured tone she talks about her condition, the stigma attached and the deadening effects of medication. Her controlled narrative is disrupted by interjections from the part of her mind she has learned to suppress. Delusions, hallucinations and threatening voices cut into her reality and Saks, in a…
Kay Redfield Jamison’s classic memoir of bipolar disorder captures the highs and lows of the illness with exceptional clarity.
She describes the dilemma as a doctor of deciding whether to reveal her diagnosis, a dilemma that resonated with me as a law professor, but is common to many people with bipolar who can “pass for normal” most of the time.
An Unquiet Mind is a definitive examination of manic depression from both sides: doctor and patient, the healer and the healed. A classic memoir of enormous candour and courage, it teems with the wit and wisdom of its writer, Dr Kay Redfield Jamison.
With an introduction by Andrew Solomon, writer and lecturer on psychology and culture.
'It stands alone in the literature of manic depression for its bravery, brilliance and beauty.' - Oliver Sacks
I was used to my mind being my best friend. Now, all of a sudden, my mind had turned on me: it mocked me for my…
Sleep. Memory. Pleasure. Fear. Language. We experience these things every day, but how do our brains create them? Your Brain, Explained is a personal tour around your gray matter. Neuroscientist Marc Dingman gives you a crash course in how your brain works and explains the latest research on the brain…
This book by Esmé Weijun Wang is a captivating book of essays by an author with the diagnosis.
It provides multiple perspectives on life with the illness and defies the familiar narratives of illness, treatment, and recovery. I had a hard time setting it down, even though it had natural breaks between essays. It is beautifully written.
An intimate, moving book written with the immediacy and directness of one who still struggles with the effects of mental and chronic illness, The Collected Schizophrenias cuts right to the core. Schizophrenia is not a single unifying diagnosis, and Esme Weijun Wang writes not just to her fellow members of the "collected schizophrenias" but to those who wish to understand it as well. Opening with the journey toward her diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, Wang discusses the medical community's own disagreement about labels and procedures for diagnosing those with mental illness, and then follows an arc that examines the manifestations of…
The heart of this book is the stories of individuals with serious mental illness based on repeated interviews over the course of years, which illustrate the dysfunction of our mental health system.
These stories are woven together with interviews of experts, research, and the author’s experiences living with a sister who had schizophrenia. I learned as much from this book as any other single book I have read in the field.
A psychiatrist and award-winning documentarian sheds light on the mental-health-care crisis in the United States.
When Dr. Kenneth Rosenberg trained as a psychiatrist in the late 1980s, the state mental hospitals, which had reached peak occupancy in the 1950s, were being closed at an alarming rate, with many patients having nowhere to go. There has never been a more important time for this conversation, as one in five adults--40 million Americans--experiences mental illness each year. Today, the largest mental institution in the United States is the Los Angeles County Jail, and the last refuge for many of the 20,000 mentally…
The brain: brilliant, powerful... and utterly bizarre. Why would someone be terrified they might slip down a shower drain? Or insist they've turned into a cat? What can rare brain disorders—and surprisingly common mental quirks—teach us about how we think, feel, and behave?
Jails and prisons have become our de facto psychiatric hospitals.
This book struck me with particular force because I both teach these issues and recognize that, but for privilege and access to good treatment, I could easily be on the other side of the bars.
An urgent expose of the mental health crisis in our courts, jails, and prisons
America has made mental illness a crime. Jails in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago each house more people with mental illnesses than any hospital. Across America, as many as half of all inmates have a psychiatric problem. One in four fatal police shootings involves a person with such disorders.
In this revelatory book, journalist Alisa Roth goes deep inside the criminal justice system to show how and why it has become a warehouse where inmates are denied proper treatment, abused, and punished in ways that…
In this personal and compassionate survey of mental health in America, readers meet the real-life advocates working on the frontlines of reform.
Through their stories, and bolstered by his own experience inside the system after suffering a psychotic break, law professor Fredrick Vars reveals that hopeful solutions are already in practice. Empowering people with mental illness to become effective advocates and mentors for themselves and others may be the spark to fuel much-needed change.
