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Reading Challenge A memoir about mental illness |
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Brain on fire : my month of madness
by Susannah Cahalan
A gripping memoir and medical suspense story about a young New York Post reporter's struggle with a rare and terrifying disease, opening a new window into the fascinating world of brain science. One day in 2009, twenty-four-year-old Susannah Cahalan woke up alone in a strange hospital room, strapped to her bed, under guard, and unable to move or speak. A wristband marked her as a flight risk, and her medical records--chronicling a month-long hospital stay of which she had no memory at all--showed hallucinations, violence, and dangerous instability. Only weeks earlier, Susannah had been on the threshold of a new, adult life: a healthy, ambitious college grad a few months into her first serious relationship and a promising career as a cub reporter at a major New York newspaper. Who was the stranger who had taken over her body? What was happening to her mind? In this swift and breathtaking narrative, Susannah tells the astonishing true story of her inexplicable descent into madness and the brilliant, lifesaving diagnosis that nearly didn't happen. A team of doctors would spend a month--and more than a million dollars--trying desperately to pin down a medical explanation for what had gone wrong. Meanwhile, as the days passed and her family, boyfriend, and friends helplessly stood watch by her bed, she began to move inexorably through psychosis into catatonia and, ultimately, toward death. Yet even as this period nearly tore her family apart, it offered an extraordinary testament to their faith in Susannah and their refusal to let her go. Then, at the last minute, celebrated neurologist Souhel Najjar joined her team and, with the help of a lucky, ingenious test, saved her life. He recognized the symptoms of a newly discovered autoimmune disorder in which the body attacks the brain, a disease now thought to be tied to both schizophrenia and autism, and perhaps the root of demonic possessions throughout history. Far more than simply a riveting read and a crackling medical mystery, Brain on Fire is the powerful account of one woman's struggle to recapture her identity and to rediscover herself among the fragments left behind. Using all her considerable journalistic skills, and building from hospital records and surveillance video, interviews with family and friends, and excerpts from the deeply moving journal her father kept during her illness, Susannah pieces together the story of her lost month to write an unforgettable memoir about memory and identity, faith and love. It is an important, profoundly compelling tale of survival and perseverance that is destined to become a classic.
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Sociopath : a memoir
by Patric Gagne
The acclaimed New York Times bestselling memoir of the author's struggle to understand her own sociopathy and shed light on the often maligned and misunderstood mental disorder. A cross between a podcast by relationship therapist Esther Perel and a salacious tell-all. --San Francisco Chronicle Patric Gagne realized she made others uncomfortable before she started kindergarten. Something about her caused people to react in a way she didn't understand. She suspected it was because she didn't feel things the way other kids did. Emotions like fear, guilt, and empathy eluded her. For the most part, she felt nothing. And she didn't like the way that nothing felt. She did her best to pretend she was like everyone else, but the constant pressure to conform to a society she knew rejected anyone like her was unbearable. So Patric stole. She lied. She was occasionally violent. She became an expert lock-picker and home-invader. All with the goal of replacing the nothingness with...something. In college, Patric finally confirmed what she'd long suspected. She was a sociopath. But even though it was the very first personality disorder identified--well over 200 years ago--sociopathy had been neglected by mental health professionals for decades. She was told there was no treatment, no hope for a normal life. She found herself haunted by sociopaths in pop culture, madmen and evil villains who are considered monsters. Her future looked grim. But when Patric reconnects with an old flame, she gets a glimpse of a future beyond her diagnosis. If she's capable of love, it must mean that she isn't a monster. With the help of her sweetheart (and some curious characters she meets along the way) she embarks on a mission to prove that the millions of Americans who share her diagnosis aren't all monsters either. This is the inspiring story of her journey to change her fate and how she managed to build a life full of love and hope.
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Girl, interrupted
by Susanna Kaysen
At the age of eighteen Susanna Kaysen was committed to a psychiatric hospital by a doctor she had seen only once. For the next two years she lived on the ward for teenage girls at McLean Hospital, a psychiatric institution as reknowned for its celebrity patients -- among them, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles -- as for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary.Kaysen's memoir encompasses the horror and the humor of the parallel universe she enters, using her razor-edged perception to present vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers in the keleidoscopically shifting landscape of the sixties. Girl, Interrupted is a clear-sighted, unflinching document that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery.
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No one gets to fall apart : a memoir
by Sarah Labrie
From television writer and producer Sarah LaBrie, comes a poignant memoir about the love and resilience of a mother and daughter in the midst of mental illness--
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Sure, I'll join your cult: a memoir of mental illness and the quest to belong anywhere
by Maria Bamford
Maria Bamford is a comedian's comedian and has forever fought to find a place to belong. From struggling with an eating disorder as a child of the 1980s, to navigating a career in the arts (and medical debt and psychiatric institutionalization), she has tried just about every method possible to not only be a part of the world, but to want to be a part of it. With sincerity and transparency, she recounts every anonymous fellowship she has joined (including but not limited to: Debtors Anonymous, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, and Overeaters Anonymous), every hypomanic episode (from worrying about selling out under capitalism to enforcing union rules on her Netflix TV show set to protect her health), and every easy 1-to-3-step recipe for fudge in between.
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Easy crafts for the insane : a mostly funny memoir of mental illness and making things
by Kelly Williams Brown
Kelly Williams Brown had 700 Bad Days. Her marriage collapsed, she broke three limbs in separate and unrelated incidents, her father was diagnosed with cancer, and she fell into a deep depression that ended in what could delicately be referred to as a "rest cure" at an inpatient facility. Before that, she had several very good years: she wrote a bestselling book, spoke at NASA, had a beautiful wedding, and inspired hundreds of thousands of readers to live as grown-ups in an often-screwed-up world, though these accomplishments mostly just made her feel fraudulent. One of the few things that kept her moving forward was, improbably, crafting. Not Martha Stewart-perfect crafting, either--what could be called "simple," "accessible" or, perhaps, "rustic" creations were the joy and accomplishments she found in her worst days. To craft is to set things right in the littlest of ways; no matter how disconnected you feel, you can still fold a tiny paper star, and that's not nothing. In Easy Crafts for the Insane, crafting tutorials serve as the backdrop of a life dissolved, then glued back together.
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What my bones know : a memoir of healing from complex trauma
by Stephanie Foo
Drawing on interviews with scientists and psychologists, and trying a variety of innovative therapies, the author, diagnosed with Complex PTSD—a condition that occurs when trauma happens continuously—investigates the little-understood science behind this disorder that has shaped her life.
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Dear friend, from my life I write to you in your life
by Yiyun Li
Yiyun Li's searing personal story of hospitalizations for depression and thoughts of suicide is interlaced with reflections on the solace and affirmations of life and personhood that Li found in reading the journals, diaries, and fiction of other writers: William Trevor, Katherine Mansfield, and more.
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The hollow half : a memoir of bodies and borders
by Sarah Aziza
In October 2019, Sarah Aziza, daughter and granddaughter of Gazan refugees, is narrowly saved after being hospitalized for an eating disorder. The doctors revive her body, but it is no simple thing to return to the land of the living. Aziza's crisis is a rupture which brings both her ancestral and personal past into vivid present. The hauntings begin in the hospital cafeteria, when a mysterious incident stirs the taste of Aziza's childhood, and summons the familiar voice of her deceased Palestinian grandmother. In the months following, as she responds to a series of ghostly dreams, Aziza unearths family secrets that reveal the ways her own trauma and anorexia echo generations of Palestinian displacement and erasure--and how her fight to recover builds on a century of defiant survival and love. As she moves towards this legacy, Aziza learns to resist the forces of occupation, denial, and patriarchy both within and outside her.
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My good bright wolf : a emoir
by Sarah Moss
From the acclaimed author of Ghost Wall, Summerwater, and The Fell, Sarah Moss's My Good Bright Wolf is an unflinching memoir about childhood, food, books, and our ability to see, become, and protect ourselves. Through narratives of women and food, second-wave feminism and postwar puritanism, and her own challenges with a health care system that discounts the experiences of those it ought to serve, Moss seeks truth in the stories we tell ourselves and others. Harm can become power. Attention can become care. A body and a mind, though working hard together, can be at odds. And yet. In books, in the landscape of imagination, a girl can run free. Beautiful and sharp, moving and unapologetic, erudite and very funny, My Good Bright Wolf is a memoir that breaks the rules.
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Darkness visible : a memoir of madness
by William Styron
A work of great personal courage and a literary tour de force, this bestseller is Styron's true account of his descent into a crippling and almost suicidal depression. Styron is perhaps the first writer to convey the full terror of depression's psychic landscape, as well as the illuminating path to recovery. From the Trade Paperback edition.
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Something in the woods loves you
by Jarod K. Anderson
Bats can hear shapes, plants can eat light, and bees can dance maps. When his life took him to a painfully dark place, Jarod K. Anderson found comfort and redemption in these facts and the massive shift in perspective that comes from paying a new kind of attention to nature. Something in the Woods Loves You tells the story of the darkest stretch of a young man's life, and how deliberate and meditative encounters with plants and animals helped him see the light at every turn. Ranging from optimistic contemplations of mortality to appreciations of a single mushroom, Anderson has written a lyrical love letter to the natural world and given us the tools to see it all anew.
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Invisible storm : a soldier's memoir of politics and PTSD
by Jason Kander
From political wunderkind and former army intelligence officer Jason Kander comes a haunting, powerful memoir about politics, PTSD, impossible choices--and how sometimes walking away from the chance of a lifetime can be the greatest decision of all.
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