Books like Hidden Valley Road — picked by fans

Elyn Saks is one of my heroes.

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.

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.

Instead of starting with the question, "How can I change my child's behavior?" Andrew Solomon starts by asking, "How does my child experience the world?"

He tells the stories of parents who have struggled to accept that their children are profoundly different from them and offers a deeply optimistic view of relationships and family. This book takes a fascinating dive into different ways of being human – among them, deafness, dwarfism, transgenderism, autism – and inspires us to look at our children through new eyes.

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.

Robert Whitaker’s books inform my work. Both Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic provided crucial policy background as I searched for my brother's personhood. Whitaker’s deep research and ferocious insistence that we rethink psychiatric care guided me into the world of mental illness, the history of treatment, and the controversy over forcing medication on unwilling people. I sympathize with Whitaker and the people who believe anti-psychotics make things worse. But I also meet many with diagnoses who believe in the mantra, “take your meds.” Best practices cannot be one-size (pill)-fits all. I end my own book by imagining the best possible world for mental health treatment—guided both by Whitaker and his most vehement critic, E. Fuller Torrey.

When I began my book, I wanted to know who my mother was at 22, when she left a brief disaster of a first marriage with an infant—my brother, Mike. Mom grew up in Montana, embedded in immigrant Jewish life. My great-uncle, Myron Brinig, wrote about that life and our family in Singermann, his first book (now, alas, an obscure classic available mostly in libraries). In early drafts of my book, I included far too much family history, with Myron as my guide. I loved the detail; my early readers did not. So my published book stays close to the core emotional story. And yet Singermann opens a window not just on our family but others with complicated immigration stories, dark secrets, and intergenerational mental illness.

This is an inciteful and practical guide, written by clinical psychologist Xavier Amador, that addresses anosognosia—the common inability of people with severe mental illness to recognize their condition. Drawing on his own experience as both a clinician and a family member of someone with schizophrenia, Amador offers compassionate advice for helping loved ones accept treatment without coercion. No small feat when the symptomatic persons truly believe nothing is amiss.

The book introduces the LEAP (Listen, Empathize, Agree, Partner) approach, a communication strategy designed to build trust and reduce family conflict. It’s a must-read for anyone supporting a sibling or parent with schizophrenia or other psychiatric disorders. I found myself deeply empathetic to family members who experience burnout when the symptoms of psychosis seem insurmountable.

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.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s son, Mark, wrote this semi-fictional exploratory piece in an autobiographical style while exploring the nature of drug-induced madness coupled with undiagnosed schizophrenia while living an alternative lifestyle in a working commune. Through it all, the nature of humanity is questioned in a humorously chaotic way. And yet he pulls it all together to somehow not only make sense of, but also be enlightened by, the madness of this counterculture lifestyle. 

Mark Vonnegut later returns to university and obtains a medical degree while exploring the use of orthomolecular medicine as a treatment to combat schizophrenia. While successfully obtaining his medical degree, he eventually disavows orthomolecular therapy as a plausible treatment.

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.