Here are 100 books that Asylum fans have personally recommended if you like
Asylum.
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While volunteering in a psychotic disorder unit at a Montreal psychiatric hospital, I witnessed firsthand the extraordinary lives of people hospitalized for their symptoms. As their stories accumulated, I felt compelled to record them. What emerged was a stark indictment of society’s failure to see the human being behind experiences such as hearing voices, delusions, and hallucinations. Compounding this injustice is the persistent, misguided belief that psychosis and violence are intrinsically linked—they are not. My work became a mission: to reveal the humanity behind the diagnosis and to challenge the stigma, opening minds to the creativity, beauty, and love that exist in every person who has endured the profound exclusion of mental illness.
A ground-breaking memoir, this book recounts Elyn Saks’s journey through the depths of schizophrenia while forging a remarkable career as a legal scholar. Saks, diagnosed with chronic schizophrenia during her college years, offers an unflinching account of her psychotic breaks, hospitalizations, and the constant battle to stay grounded in reality.
Yet, her story is one of resilience and hope, showing that a fulfilling life with schizophrenia is possible. Saks’s narrative is both personal and educational, offering insight into the lived experience of mental illness while advocating for compassion and understanding. Her bravery was what captured my attention. Her no-holds-barred personal story gives hope to everyone who has been given a devastating diagnosis of schizophrenia.
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…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I’m Mona Simpson, the author of seven novels. I grew up with a mentally ill parent who struggled to support me, her only child, as a single mother. I saw firsthand the toll living in the world cost her. One of my first experiences of adulthood was a sense of relief in discovering that staying above water was manageable, even easy. Walking home from my first real job, seeing all the other people’s backs and legs hurry ahead of me, I liked being one of the many. I wondered if my mother could have ever felt that ease if there had been an alternative.
I found myself returning to the resonant images again and again. The book presents pictures of a young man’s mother throughout her life before her mental illness, and with it, and includes some bits of narrative, letters from her and from his father.
These exerpts allowed me to construct the story of a family’s tragedy, the evolution of a beautiful young woman into someone else, someone who was still, nevertheless, painfully loved. One of the typewritten paragraphs begins, “Right after you were born, your mother believed she had fallen in love with someone else.”
I felt the young photographer’s mission to understand and hold his love for his imperfect parents driving the book. It was not put together for me, the reader, but out of a driving necessity. We are nevertheless allowed to witness the young man’s struggle and evolution.
Breaking down the structure of the photograph as truth and the book as narrative, Joshua Lutz's second monograph, HESITATING BEAUTY, it is an intimate portrait unlike other photographic models. Rethinking how photographs and text can function, Lutz blends family archives, interviews and letters with his own photographic practice seamlessly into a precious, fictitious experience of a life and family consumed by mental illness. Instead of showing us what it looks like, HESITATING BEAUTY is able to play with our own conceptions of reality to show us what it feels like.
Joshua Lutz: ""Holding on so tightly to what I believed…
I’m Mona Simpson, the author of seven novels. I grew up with a mentally ill parent who struggled to support me, her only child, as a single mother. I saw firsthand the toll living in the world cost her. One of my first experiences of adulthood was a sense of relief in discovering that staying above water was manageable, even easy. Walking home from my first real job, seeing all the other people’s backs and legs hurry ahead of me, I liked being one of the many. I wondered if my mother could have ever felt that ease if there had been an alternative.
In 1995, in the attic of a decommissioned mental hospital in New York State, a curator of New York State Museum, a local volunteer, a psychiatrist/ documentarian, and a photographer found a trove of suitcases, doctor’s bags, steamer trunks with Chinese motif, housekeys, photographs, earrings, belts, upright ladies Saratoga trunks (“so named because they could hold enough clothes for an entire summer season in the resort town of Saratoga Springs.")
The researchers ventured further into the hospital's now vacant sites, an abandoned bowling alley, and its burial grounds. Finally, they obtained permission to get a few hours with the medical records, which were stored in an abandoned hospital building contaminated with asbestos and lead, requiring them to don protective gear and booties.
Their hope was to bring the forgotten patients who’d spent years in the institution back to life. This book and its intricate details haunted me. There are so…
"The Lives They Left Behind is a deeply moving testament to the human side of mental illness, and of the narrow margin which so often separates the sane from the mad. It is a remarkable portrait, too, of the life of a psychiatric asylum--the sort of community in which, for better and for worse, hundreds of thousands of people lived out their lives. Darby Penney and Peter Stastny's careful historical (almost archaeological) and biographical reconstructions give us unique insight into these lives which would otherwise be lost and, indeed, unimaginable to the rest of us." --Oliver Sacks "Fascinating...The haunting thing…
The Year Mrs. Cooper Got Out More
by
Meredith Marple,
The coastal tourist town of Great Wharf, Maine, boasts a crime rate so low you might suspect someone’s lying.
Nevertheless, jobless empty nester Mallory Cooper has become increasingly reclusive and fearful. Careful to keep the red wine handy and loath to leave the house, Mallory misses her happier self—and so…
I’m Mona Simpson, the author of seven novels. I grew up with a mentally ill parent who struggled to support me, her only child, as a single mother. I saw firsthand the toll living in the world cost her. One of my first experiences of adulthood was a sense of relief in discovering that staying above water was manageable, even easy. Walking home from my first real job, seeing all the other people’s backs and legs hurry ahead of me, I liked being one of the many. I wondered if my mother could have ever felt that ease if there had been an alternative.
This is a book in which I have underlines on almost every page. It’s the story of the development of Psychiatry — the whole field — in the United States; in this case, there really is a story. One man, Thomas Kirkbride, the superintendent of the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane, largely determined the course of how we first thought about and treated mental illness in America. His vision became the template for the large state institutions erected according to his model.
Steeped in the ideals of the European protocol of “moral treatment,” Kirkbride believed to the end that mental illness could be cured with nature, safe containment, music, art, reading, good food, and a slowed-down, kinder life.
The Art of Asylum-Keeping is a social history of medical practice in a private nineteenth-century asylum, the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane in Philadelphia. It recreates everyday life in the asylum and explores its social, as well as its scientific, legitimation.
I read and write to better understand people. Why do we do what we do, feel what we feel, hide what we hide? Any book that illuminates these questions and their answers draws me in. Reading and writing are ways that I can attempt to walk in someone else’s shoes and see the world through their eyes, expanding my own understanding of the world. Perhaps the books on this list will offer you the same opportunity.
This book mixes history, social classes, cultures, and repression in a broiling stew of love, fear, and the will to survive that kept me captivated.
I wanted to see the characters overcome their own weaknesses as they built their survival skills in this captivating story that takes place in Spain during the Franco dictatorship.
I am an Oxford local historian, and the only Oxford guide endorsed by the Lewis Carroll Society. I have helped shape Oxford’s annual Alice’s Day since the first one in 2007, and have participated in French, Dutch, Canadian, Brazilian and British TV and radio documentaries, most notably for BBC 2 and BBC Radio 4. My interest is mainly the many Oxford realities which are hidden away within the apparent fantasy of the ‘Alice’ books, an angle which has enabled me to lecture on this internationally famous topic as far away as Assam in India. Subsequently, my appreciation of Carroll’s versatility as a mathematician, photographer, inventor, diarist, and letter writer has grown steadily over the years.
Mention the name ‘Lewis Carroll’ and most people will immediately think of the two Alice books. Very few would equate the name to Charles Dodgson, the photographer. This, however, is the aspect of the multi-talented Oxford don which Gernsheim, a professional photographer himself, appraised in his 1949 first edition for the very first time, concluding that Dodgson was ‘the most outstanding photographer of children in the nineteenth century. Many of the black and white plates substantiate this claim, but equally, Dodgson’s mastery of this new invention enabled him to meet and photograph (sometimes uniquely) numerous famous writers and artists, as well as many Oxford contemporaries. As an aside, Edward Wakeling’s 2015 Catalogue Raisonné is a comprehensive listing of every one of Dodgson’s hundreds of known photographs.
Don’t mess with the hothead—or he might just mess with you. Slater Ibáñez is only interested in two kinds of guys: the ones he wants to punch, and the ones he sleeps with. Things get interesting when they start to overlap. A freelance investigator, Slater trolls the dark side of…
I discovered Jewish photographers a couple of decades ago when I worked on a book, Cityscapes: A History of New York in Images. At the time, I was intrigued with how to tell the city’s history through photographs. Then, when I started to request permission to publish, I discovered that most of the photographers were Jewish New Yorkers. That sent me down a twisting path as I learned about more and more and more Jewish photographers. All types of photographers: professional and lay, photojournalists and street photographers, fashion photographers and family photographers. I fell in love with the multitude of their images. Turns out I was not the only one.
I’m not a fan of theory, which Amos Morris-Reich is, but I loved how he embedded his theory in five fascinating cases that would not normally be considered together.
One case involved a Nazi photographer, one concerned a Jewish promoter and collector of photographs, one looked at Jewish photographers in Eastern Europe, and two considered very different Jewish photographers: Helmar Lerski and Robert Frank. The combination is thought-provoking.
It is a sign of the accepted evidentiary status of photographs that historians regularly append them to their accounts, Amos Morris-Reich observes. Very often, however, these photographs are treated as mere illustrations, simple documentations of the events that transpired. Scholars of photography, on the other hand, tend to prioritize the photographs themselves, relegating the historical contexts to the background. For Morris-Reich, however, photography exists within reality; it partakes in and is very much a component of the history it records. Morris-Reich examines how photography affects categories of history and experience, how it is influenced by them, and the ways in…
I am attracted to people and ideas that bridge the internal and external life through their art and writing. I was driven to pursue art history and psychoanalysis for this reason. In one field, we have the external object as the center of inquiry, and in the other, the Self. These books all inspired me to see the world through a new lens.
A century after German scholars developed art history as a highly conservative meta-theory well suited to the study of the broader categories of “civilization” and “culture,” the Viennese psychoanalytic movement developed a highly radical meta-theory that posited civilization and culture as fictions meant to curb individual desires.
Art historian Mary Bergstein illuminates photography's rich role in Freud’s thinking. Bergstein deftly reminds us that Freud’s interdisciplinary approach to the history of art and the new science of psychoanalysis was specifically meaningful to his time and place. During the brief period when Vienna would be recognized as the capital of European modernism, psychoanalysis developed as a meta-theory—a radical one—with the cult of individual desires and fears at its heart.
Photographs shaped the view of the world in turn-of-the-century Central Europe, bringing images of everything from natural and cultural history to masterpieces of Greek sculpture into homes and offices. Sigmund Freud's library-no exception to this trend-was filled with individual photographs and images in books. According to Mary Bergstein, these photographs also profoundly shaped Freud's thinking in ways that were no less important because they may have been involuntary and unconscious.In Mirrors of Memory, lavishly illustrated with reproductions of the photos from Freud's voluminous collection, she argues that studying the man and his photographs uncovers a key to the origins of…
The wilderness has fascinated me since childhood. I spent much of my teens and twenties rock-climbing, ice-climbing, and mountaineering in ranges from Alaska to Argentina. By my early 30s, however, my interest in outdoor sports was waning, and my interest in photographing wild places was soaring. I became a full-time wilderness landscape photographer in 1993. For fifteen years, I shot 4x5 film. Then, in 2008, I retired my film cameras for good and began shooting digitally. Today, after more than 30 years of full-time landscape photography, I am still enthralled with the arduous, ecstatic experience of trying to capture the elusive beauty of the wilderness.
I loved this book because it deepened my understanding of light, lenses, cameras, how humans view color, and the limits of human vision. I strongly believe that the more I know about the tools I use to create my images and how my images are perceived by my viewers, the better a photographer I will become.
Reading this book took me one long step further toward that goal.
While there are many books that teach the "how-to" of photography, Science for the Curious Photographer is a book for those who also want to understand how photography works. Beginning with an introduction to the history and science of photography, Charles S. Johnson, Jr. addresses questions about the principles of photography, such as why a camera needs a lens, how lenses work, and why modern lenses are so complicated.
Addressing the complex aspects of digital photography, the book discusses color management, resolution, "noise" in images, and the limits of human perception. The creation and appreciation of art in photography is…
I discovered Jewish photographers a couple of decades ago when I worked on a book, Cityscapes: A History of New York in Images. At the time, I was intrigued with how to tell the city’s history through photographs. Then, when I started to request permission to publish, I discovered that most of the photographers were Jewish New Yorkers. That sent me down a twisting path as I learned about more and more and more Jewish photographers. All types of photographers: professional and lay, photojournalists and street photographers, fashion photographers and family photographers. I fell in love with the multitude of their images. Turns out I was not the only one.
It filled me with wonder at how much one could learn from studying just one photograph. The photo, by Dmitri Baltermants, a Soviet Jewish photojournalist, was taken outside of Kerch, in Ukraine, of dead bodies lying in the snow in 1942. Baltermants focused on a non-Jewish woman mourning the death of her non-Jewish husband, but the photo came to symbolize so much more.
I love how Shneer traces the path of this photo across decades, illuminating how many meanings can be attached to a single image.
In January 1942, Soviet press photographers came upon a scene like none they had ever documented. That day, they took pictures of the first liberation of a German mass atrocity, where an estimated 7,000 Jews and others were executed at an anti-tank trench near Kerch on the Crimean peninsula. Dmitri Baltermants, a photojournalist working for the Soviet newspaper Izvestiia, took photos that day that would have a long life in shaping the image of Nazi genocide in and against the Soviet Union. Presenting never before seen photographs, Grief: The Biography of a Holocaust Photograph shows how Baltermants used the image…
