Here are 100 books that Bedlam fans have personally recommended if you like
Bedlam.
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I am passionate about sharing my story of having it all and then losing it all due to my bipolar disorder. I tell my story of living with the flights above the clouds of bipolar mania, the unbearable hopelessness of bipolar depression, the fear and dread of severe anxiety, and the overwhelming impulse to run and escape during panic attacks with complete honesty and openness so other people can see themselves in my story and realize they are not alone and that they too will come out the other side.
I like An Unquiet Mind because Kay Redfield Jameson tells her story of being a college professor while living with bipolar disorder.
She writes as if talking to a friend that she can trust, and she took me on her journey of incredible highs and grandiose thoughts and devastating lows of debilitating depression. I, too, live with bipolar disorder, and as I read this book, I saw myself. It helped me realize I am not alone. It gave me hope that I, too, would come out the other side.
I keep this book close and pick it up often. It is an old friend that helped me heal.
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…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
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.
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…
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.
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…
This book is an elegiac meditation on the will to survive. Tor, a beluga whaler, and his wife, Astrid, a botanist specializing in Arctic flora, are stranded during the dark season of 1937-38 at his remote whaling station in the Svalbard archipelago when they misjudge ice conditions and fail to…
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.
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…
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.
Part memoir, part investigative journalism, Ron Powers’s book offers a scorching indictment of the American mental health system, interwoven with the heartbreaking story of his two sons as they battle schizophrenia. Powers traces the historical neglect, the shame, the misinformation and mistreatment of people with mental illness while offering a deeply personal perspective on the impact such conditions have on families.
Passionate, informative, and empathetic, this book sheds light on the urgent need for mental health reform and societal compassion. I ached for Ron Powers and his need to shed light on a subject that pushes people to the margins of society.
"Extraordinary and courageous . . . No doubt if everyone were to read this book, the world would change."---New York Times Book Review
New York Times-bestselling author Ron Powers' critically acclaimed narrative of the social history of mental illness in America paired with the deeply personal story of his two sons' battles with schizophrenia.
From the centuries of torture of "lunatiks" at Bedlam Asylum to the infamous eugenics era to the follies of the anti-psychiatry movement to the current landscape in which too many families struggle alone to manage afflicted love ones, Powers limns our fears and myths about mental…
I have the expertise for this topic because I was raised in a loving home with a mother who struggled with bipolar disorder. At times my life was hilariously adventurous or heart-wrenchingly sad. Given little direction, I married an alcoholic and then went on to work at a Drug and Alcohol Treatment Center. I have fallen on hard times, but at the age of thirty-two, as a single mother collecting welfare, I managed to grief, heal and dig myself out, creating a rewarding life. I am optimistic, and I try to find humour in all things, especially after the tears and healing have subsided. My writing has brought me tremendous healing and joy.
A harrowing and beautiful tale of two sisters growing up with a paranoid schizophrenic mother. The author describes a fine line between gentle artistic creativity and debilitating mental illness. The reader will come away with a better understanding of how deeply children are affected growing up in a dysfunctional and traumatic environment. A mother's love and a journey to forgiveness teach us the complex meaning of love.
In the tradition of The Glass Castle, two sisters confront schizophrenia in this New York Times bestselling poignant memoir about family and mental illness. Through stunning prose and original art, The Memory Palace captures the love between mother and daughter, the complex meaning of truth, and one family’s capacity for forgiveness.
*A Washington Post Best Book of the Year * *The National Book Critics Circle Award Winner for Best Autobiography*
“People have abandoned their loved ones for much less than you’ve been through,” Mira Bartók is told at her mother’s memorial service. It is a poignant observation about the…
Tina Edwards loved her childhood and creating fairy houses, a passion shared with her father, a world-renowned architect. But at nine years old, she found him dead at his desk and is haunted by this memory. Tina's mother abruptly moved away, leaving Tina with feelings of abandonment and suspicion.
Sometimes you need to search for the next roads to take in your life; other times these roads approach you. I was looking for new ways to use my long-term communication and mental health advocacy skills and then, sadly, the Sandy Hook shooting occurred. I immediately wanted to help community members ease their pain and assist cities nationwide to greatly improve their disaster mental health response. I never expected a pandemic would arrive only two months after I published, making my book all the more important. Now climate change is exacerbating our already stressful times, and we must act to stem mental health issues before they become out of hand.
We are continually learning how the brain works through the work of neuroscientists. Dr. Sweeton uses her knowledge in the field to give readers a view into our brain and what we know at the present time about its functioning, how it is affected by mental illness, and what changes can occur through brain-based therapy. We have made great strides in helping individuals with such illnesses as schizophrenia and bipolar and learning how disorders such as PTSD occur and impact the brain. The book’s information is reader-friendly. The more we know about this fascinating area of the body, the better treatments that can be developed to help those who suffer from trauma-impacting events become more resilient and whole.
Recent advances in affective neuroscience reveal long-held secrets of mental health and illness in the brain. However, the gap between brain science and clinical practice is wide, and many clinicians find neuroscience to be tedious, overly technical and laborious to learn. Eight Key Brain Areas of Mental Health and Illness bridges this gap, providing key information about the neuroscience of mental illness so clinicians can apply it in their work.
In this handbook, clinical psychologist and best-selling author Jennifer Sweeton details the eight main areas of the brain affected by mental illness, how brain changes show up in the…
I am an Associate Lecturer and Adjunct in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta. After being a piano teacher, working in communications for an NGO, and heading up the children’s department at a public library, I returned to university. While in graduate school, I underwent treatments for breast cancer, leading me into researching and teaching medical narratives, while focusing on works by breast cancer survivors. Introduced to graphic literature by a colleague, I began exploring a whole new world of literature. I now teach courses on graphic literature: memoirs, histories, speculative fiction, and the occasional comic.
There are lots of graphic novels and memoirs with medical themes, but I want to shine a light on this unique collaboration by brothers who capture their shared experience of schizophrenia, one diagnosed with the condition and the other who accompanies him through difficult navigation of an inadequate health care system and the struggle of managing a disease that isolates individuals and families from their communities.
Each brother works side-by-side to tell their interrelated stories: Olivier is a visual artist, and Clem is an author and playwright. Olivier’s drawings are on the verso, in simple black and white sketches, often unframed, of family holidays, from picnics to Christmas, with obscuring smudges, stiff figures, and unsmiling faces that belie the sun, picnic baskets, and decorated trees of the settings. He draws his world of meetings with doctors, attending group meetings, and struggling to get and hold jobs.
In 1976, Ben Martini was diagnosed with Schizophrenia. A decade later, his brother Olivier was told he had the same disease. The past thirty years have seen the Martini family struggle to understand and cope with a devastating illness, frustrated at turns by a health care system lacking in resources and empathy, the imperfect science of medication, and the strain of mental illness on familial relationships. Throughout it all, Olivier, an accomplished visual artist, drew - sketches, comic strips, portraits - documenting his own experience and capturing the essence of a very misunderstood disease. "Bitter Medicine" places Olivier's graphic narrative…
I am a practicing clinical psychologist, often at odds with the mainstream of my mental health profession. I have a strong interest in how society, culture, politics, philosophy, and psychology intersect, and my previous books about depression, activism, and anti-authoritarianism reflect that. The late historian Howard Zinn described me this way: “It is always refreshing to find someone who stands at the edge of his profession and dissects its failures with a critical eye, refusing to be deceived by its pretensions. Bruce Levine condemns the cold, technological approach to mental health and, to our benefit, looks for deeper solutions.”
“What does it mean to be called crazy in a crazy world?” asks Will Hall, the host of Madness Radio. Hall is one of the most gifted media hosts whom I have ever been interviewed by, as he is especially talented in drawing out his subjects. Hall is unique in that he is also a therapist who was once diagnosed with schizophrenia. Outside Mental Health is a collection of his interviews with more than 60 scientists, journalists, doctors, activist ex-psychiatric patients, and artists who provide alternative visions to psychiatry’s medical model—a paradigm that has been nonproductive and counterproductive for many people.
Outside Mental Health: Voices and Visions of Madness reveals the human side of mental illness. In this remarkable collection of interviews and essays, therapist, Madness Radio host, and schizophrenia survivor Will Hall asks, "What does it mean to be called crazy in a crazy world?" More than 60 voices of psychiatric patients, scientists, journalists, doctors, activists, and artists create a vital new conversation about empowering the human spirit by transforming society. "This book is required reading for anyone who cares deeply about mental health and its discontents." -Jonathan Metzl, MD, author of The Protest Psychosis: Schizophrenia and Black Politics "Bold,…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
When my older sister died, I felt a pressing need to tell her story. Rachel was a strong, courageous woman, who endured decades in a psychiatric system that failed her. She was a survivor, but the stigma of severe mental illness made her an outcast from most of society. Even so, her enduring passion for poetry inspired me to write about her. I sought out other people’s stories. I enrolled in workshops and therapy. I devoured books and blogs by survivors, advocates, and family members. Everything I read pointed to a troubling rift between the dominant medical model and more humane, less damaging ones. This list represents a slice of my learning.
Before my sister became so ill, people used to say we looked alike. But ours was just a resemblance. In this novel, Dominick looks exactly like his brother, who has schizophrenia. Dominick encounters his identical twin every time he looks in a mirror. And he is terrified.
I first read this book 25 years ago and inhaled every one of the intertwined subplots in its 900 + pages. Recently, I re-read the “story within the story,” a memoir by Dominick’s grandfather. I became fascinated by his story about the Sicilian market where one chicken transforms into two whole ones—a bit of magical realism about twinning, schizophrenia, and hope. I too excavated old family documents to understand why my sibling suffered so much.
#1 New York Times Bestseller and Oprah Book Club selection
"Thoughtful . . . heart-wrenching . . . . An exercise in soul-baring storytelling—with the soul belonging to 20th-century America itself. It's hard to read and to stop reading, and impossible to forget." — USA Today
Dominick Birdsey, a forty-year-old housepainter living in Three Rivers, Connecticut, finds his subdued life greatly disturbed when his identical twin brother Thomas, a paranoid schizophrenic, commits a shocking act of self-mutilation. Dominick is forced to care for his brother as well as confront dark secrets and pain he has buried deep within himself—a journey…
