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Booklist
- Experiences of Mental Illness
NON FICTION
AN UNQUIET MIND: A MEMOIR OF MOODS AND MADNESS│Kay Redfield Jamison│B Jami
The author, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, is one of the country’s foremost experts on bipolar disorder (formerly called manic depression). She also has suffered from this illness for most of her life. This is a courageous, affecting memoir of her personal struggle, in which she gradually acknowledges that she must regulate her illness with lithium even though it diminishes the creativity of her manias.
THE FIRST AND FINAL NIGHTMARE OF SONIA REICH: A SON’S MEMOIR│Howard Reich│B Reic
Sixty years after the child Sonia Reich experienced the murders of her parents by Nazis in Dubno, Poland, and spent the war years “running,” the horrors return in late-onset post-traumatic stress disorder. To understand the past that Sonia Reich and her husband would not speak about, the author, who is their son, returns to their hometowns. This is a powerful memoir.
THE DAY THE VOICES STOPPED: A SCHIZOPHRENIC’S JOURNEY FROM MADNESS TO HOPE│Ken Steele│616.8982 Stee
For 32 years the author heard voices command him to commit suicide. Rejected by his family, he lived on the ragged edge—in mental hospitals, halfway houses, and homeless on the streets. In a seeming miracle in the early 1990s, he responded to one of the new generation of antipsychotic medications and the voices simply stopped. In his last years, he became a well-known advocate for the mentally ill.
DARKNESS VISIBLE: A MEMOIR OF MADNESS│William Styron│616.8527 Styr
At the age of 60, the distinguished writer suffered an episode of acute, suicidal depression. In this memoir, he explores his illness from its earliest origins through his eventual hospitalization. Conventional treatments offered little help, but with time he recovered.
PROZAC DIARY│Lauren Slater│616.8527 Styr
Before taking part in the trials of the new antidepressant Prozac in 1988, Lauren Slater suffered from depression, self-mutilation, obsessions and compulsions, and anorexia. In this elegant memoir, she calls her positive reaction to the medication “the single most stunning experience of my life.” She tells of turning her life around (advanced degrees, responsible jobs, a devoted mate), but doesn’t gloss over the drug’s unpleasant side effects.
WISH I COULD BE THERE: NOTES FROM A PHOBIC LIFE│Allen Shawn│B Shaw
The author, a composer and professor of music (and son of the long-time New Yorker editor William Shawn) has suffered phobias since childhood. In this recent memoir, he examines his at-times disabling agoraphobia (fear of traveling far from home) from different perspectives, such as family and upbringing, and biology.
FICTION
ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST│Ken Kesey│Fic, Cass, CD, Vid, DVD
When a new, hell-raising, life-affirming patient swaggers onto a mental ward, there begins a fierce battle of wills with the sadistic head nurse. The narrator of this comic and tragic tale is a keenly observant schizophrenic who only pretends to be mute.
THE BELL JAR│Sylvia Plath│Fic, YA, Cass
In this thinly veiled memoir of a period in the poet Plath’s young life, she cycles into and then out of a severe depression. The setting is first New York City, where she is guest editor at a ladies magazine, and then mental wards. The book is witty, disturbing, and deeply insightful.
I NEVER PROMISED YOU A ROSE GARDEN│Joanne Greenberg│Fic, YAThis is a classic in mental health literature—a fictionalized account of the author’s hospitalization in the 1960s for schizophrenia. Through intensive psychotherapy with a renowned therapist, she learns to give up an alternative kingdom in her mind that holds both awesome beauty and awesome terror. She learns that acceptance by other people in the real world is not impossible.
THE HOURS│Michael Cunningham│Fic, Q, Cass, Vid, DVD
Cunningham’s writing is informed with the exquisite sensitivity and streams of consciousness of the novelist Virginia Woolf’s. Three seemingly unconnected plot lines-one involving Woolf herself, who walked into a river with a rock in her pocket, and the others involving one of her characters and one of her readers—come together at the end.
VERONICA DECIDES TO DIE│Paulo Coelho│Fic
In this off-beat novel set in Slovenia, the girl Veronika makes a failed attempt at suicide and is told when she awakens in a psychiatric hospital that she has only a few days to live. The author questions our ideas of insanity and normalcy, and how having an end point to one’s life changes experience.
THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT TIME│Mark Haddon│Fic, CD, Cass
This is a charming, imaginative, and very funny story—a mystery—told from the point of view of a 15-year-old autistic boy. It offers great insight into the thinking of people who are autistic.
SV 1/08
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