Staff Picks
Memoirs for Mental Health Awareness Month
- Bland L.
- Tuesday, April 30
Collection
Mental Health Awareness Month is observed in the US each May. Inaugurated in 1949 by the National Association for Mental Health (now Mental Health America), it features a different theme each year. For 2024, the theme is Where to Start, “For anyone struggling with the pressure of today’s world, feeling alone, or wondering if they can feel better.” For one good place to start, check out these moving autobiographies and memoirs that explore the challenges of mental illness and neurodiversity.
Because We Are Bad
OCD and a Girl Lost in Thought
Published in 2019
As a child, Lily knew she was bad. By the age of 13, she had killed someone with a thought, spread untold disease, and spied on her friends. Only by performing a series of secret routines could she correct her wrongdoing. But it was never enough. She had a severe case of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and it ruled her life. A startling true story.
In Love
A Memoir of Love and Loss
Published in 2022
"Amy and Brian's world was changed forever with his diagnosis of early onset Alzheimer's. Forced to confront the daily frustrations and realities of the disease and its impact on their lives and marriage, Brian resolved not to let it dictate his life and instead asked himself: What makes life meaningful, and how do I want to live the rest of mine? His decision led them to learn about Dignitas and to fly to Zürich for a peaceful ending of Brian's life. In Love is the illuminating story of a marriage, of the gradual awareness that something was deeply wrong, and of a disease's effect on a man, a woman, a family. What were the signs that Brian and Amy brushed aside, and how did they cope when they could no longer ignore the truth as confirmed by an MRI? Why, in retrospect, did Brian decide to retire from his architecture practice earlier than he had planned? Bloom goes on to recount their search for a dignified and kind solution to the pain of Brian's life, and their discovery of Dignitas in Zurich, where the choice for a dignified end of life can be realized. In this moving memoir, Bloom also writes of their life together before Alzheimer's, and of a love that runs so deep that they were willing to work to find a courageous way to part"-- Provided by publisher.
Easy Crafts for the Insane
A Mostly Funny Memoir of Mental Illness and Making Things
Published in 2021
"From the New York Times bestselling author of Adulting comes a story about how to make something when you're capable of nothing"-- Provided by publisher.
Everything
Nothing
Published in 2023
Alice Carrière tells the story of her unconventional upbringing in Greenwich Village as the daughter of a remote mother, the renowned artist Jennifer Bartlett, and a charismatic father, European actor Mathieu Carrière. From an early age, Alice is forced to navigate her mother's recovered memories of ritualized sexual abuse, which she turns into art, and her father's confusing attentions. Her days are a mixture of privilege, neglect, loneliness, and danger-a child living in an adult's world, with little-to-no enforcement of boundaries or supervision. When she enters adolescence, Alice begins to lose her grasp on herself, as a dissociative disorder erases her identity and overzealous doctors medicate her further away from herself. She inhabits various roles: as a patient in expensive psychiatric hospitals, a denizen of the downtown New York music scene, the ingénue in destructive encounters with older men-ricocheting from experience to experience until a medication-induced psychosis brings these personas crashing down. Eventually, she finds purpose in caring for her mother as she descends into dementia, in a love affair with a recovering addict who steadies her, in confronting her father whose words and actions splintered her, and in finding her voice as a writer. With gallows humor and brutal honesty, Everything/Nothing/Someone explores what it means for our body and mind to belong to us wholly, irrevocably, and on our own terms. In pulsing, energetic prose that is both precise and probing, Alice manages to untangle the stories told to her by her parents, the American psychiatric complex, and her own broken mind to craft a unique and mesmerizing narrative of emergence and, finally, cure.
Girls and Their Monsters
The Genain Quadruplets and the Making of Madness in America
Published in 2023
"In 1954, researchers at the newly formed National Institute of Mental Health set out to study the genetics of schizophrenia. When they got word that four 24-year-old identical quadruplets in Lansing, Michigan, had all been diagnosed with the mental illness, they could hardly believe their ears. Here was incontrovertible proof of hereditary transmission and, thus, a chance to bring international fame to their fledgling institution. The case of the pseudonymous Genain quadruplets, they soon found, was hardly so straightforward. Contrary to fawning media portrayals of a picture-perfect Christian family, the sisters had endured the stuff of nightmares. Behind closed doors, their parents had taken shocking measures to preserve their innocence while sowing fears of sex and the outside world. In public, the quadruplets were treated as communal property, as townsfolk and members of the press had long ago projected their own paranoid fantasies about the rapidly diversifying American landscape onto the fair-skinned, ribbon-wearing quartet who danced and sang about Christopher Columbus. Even as the sisters' erratic behaviors became impossible to ignore and the NIMH whisked the women off for study, their sterling image did not falter. Girls and Their Monsters chronicles the extraordinary lives of the quadruplets and the lead psychologist who studied them, asking questions that speak directly to our times: How do delusions come to take root, both in individuals and in nations? Why does society profess to be "saving the children" when it readily exploits them? What are the authoritarian ends of innocence myths? And how do people, particularly those with serious mental illness, go on after enduring the unspeakable? Can the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood help the deeply wounded heal?"-- Provided by publisher.
The Urge
Our History of Addiction
Published in 2022
"An authoritative, illuminating, and deeply humane history of addiction-a phenomenon that remains baffling and deeply misunderstood despite having touched countless lives-by an addiction psychiatrist striving to understand his own family and himself"-- Provided by publisher.
How to Be Human
An Autistic Man's Guide to Life
Published in 2021
"A remarkable and unforgettable memoir from the first man with autism to attend Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, revealing what life is really like inside a world constructed for neurotypical minds while celebrating the many gifts of being different"-- Provided by publisher.
What My Bones Know
A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma
Published in 2022
A searing memoir of reckoning and healing from an acclaimed journalist and former This American Life producer investigating the little-understood science behind Complex PTSD and how it has shaped her life. By age thirty, Stephanie Foo was successful on paper: She had her dream job as a radio producer at This American Life and had won an Emmy. But behind her office door she was having panic attacks and sobbing at her desk. After years of questioning what was wrong with her, she was diagnosed with Complex PTSD-a condition that occurs when trauma happens continuously, over the course of years
Zig-zag Boy
A Memoir of Madness and Motherhood
Published in 2023
"A compassionate, heartrending memoir of a mother's quest to accept her son's journey through psychosis. One night in 2009, Tanya Frank finds her nineteen-year-old son, Zach--gentle and full of promise--in the grip of what the psychiatrists would label a psychotic break. Suddenly and inexplicably, Tanya is thrown into a parallel universe: Zach's world, where the phones are bugged, his friends have joined the Mafia, and helicopters are spying on his family. In the years following Zach's shifting psychiatric diagnoses, Tanya goes to war for her son, desperate to find the right answer, the right drug, the right doctor to bring him back to reality. She struggles to navigate archaic mental healthcare systems, first in California and then in her native London during lockdown. Meanwhile, the boy she raised--the chatty, precocious dog-lover, the teenager who spent summers surfing with his big brother, the UCLA student--suffers the effects of multiple hospitalizations, powerful drugs that blunt his emotions, therapies that don't work, and torturous nights on the streets. Holding on to startling moments of hope and seeking solace in nature and community, Tanya learns how to abandon her fears for the future and accept the mysteries of her son's altered states. With tenderness, lyricism, and generous candor, this compelling story conveys the power of a mother's love. Zig-Zag Boy is both a moving lamentation for things lost and a brave testament to the people we become in difficult circumstances"-- Provided by publisher.
The Survivors
A Story of War, Inheritance, and Healing
Published in 2019
"A memoir of family, the Holocaust, trauma, and identity, in which Adam Frankel, a former Obama speechwriter, must come to terms with the legacy of his family's painful past and discover who he is in the wake of a life-changing revelation about his own origins. Adam Frankel's maternal grandparents survived the Holocaust and built new lives, with new names, in Connecticut. Though they tried to leave the horrors of their past behind, the pain they suffered crossed generational lines--a fact most apparent in the mental health of Adam's mother. When Adam sat down with her to examine their family history in detail, he learned another shocking secret, this time one that unraveled Adam's entire understanding of who he is. In the midst of piecing together a story of inherited familial trauma, Adam discovered he was only half of who he thought he was, knowledge that raised essential questions of identity. Who was he, if not his father's son? If not part of a rich heritage of writers and public servants? Does it matter? What defines a family's bonds? What will he pass on to his own children? To rewrite his story in truth and to build a life for his own young family, Adam had to navigate his pain to find answers and a way forward. Throughout this journey into the past, his family's psyche, and his own understanding of identity, Adam comes to realize that while the nature of our families' traumas may vary, each of us is faced with the same choice. We can turn away from what we've inherited--or, we can confront it, in the hopes of moving on and stopping that trauma from inflicting pain on future generations. The stories Adam shares with us in The Survivors are about the ways the past can haunt our future, the resilience that can be found on the other side of trauma, and the good that can come from things that are unspeakably bad"-- Book jacket.
Good Girls
A Story and Study of Anorexia
Published in 2023
In 1995, Hadley Freeman wrote in her diary: "I just spent three years of my life in mental hospitals. So why am I crazier than I was before????" From the ages of fourteen to seventeen, Freeman lived in psychiatric wards after developing anorexia nervosa. Her doctors informed her that her body was cannibalizing her muscles and heart for nutrition, but they could tell her little why she had it, what it felt like, what recovery looked like. For the next twenty years, Freeman lived as a "functioning anorexic," grappling with new forms of self-destructive behavior as the anorexia mutated and persisted. Good Girls is an honest and hopeful story of resilience that offers a message to the nearly 30 million Americans who suffer from eating Life can be enjoyed, rather than merely endured.
Sociopath
A Memoir
Published in 2024
With emotions like fear, guilt and empathy eluding her, the author, trying to replace the nothingness with something, realizes, after connecting with an old flame, if she's capable of love, it must mean she isn't a monster and sets out to prove the millions of Americans who share her diagnosis aren't all monsters either.
We're Not Broken
Changing the Autism Conversation
Published in 2021
"This book is a message from autistic people to their parents, friends, teachers, coworkers and doctors showing what life is like on the spectrum. It's also my love letter to autistic people. For too long, we have been forced to navigate a world where all the road signs are written in another language."-- Provided by publisher.
Stolen
A Memoir
Published in 2021
An actress and producer who suffered from crippling, undiagnosed depression in her teens recounts her harrowing experience of psychological manipulation and abuse at a "therapeutic" boarding school where every moment was a test of survival, and shares how she was able to heal in the aftermath.
No Time to Panic
How I Curbed My Anxiety and Conquered a Lifetime of Panic Attacks
Published in 2023
"A memoir of news reporter Matt Gutman's experience with panic attacks and his quest to seek out treatment"-- Provided by publisher.
While You Were out
An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence
Published in 2023
"From award-winning journalist Meg Kissinger, a searing memoir of a family besieged by mental illness, as well as an incisive exploration of the systems that failed them and a testament to the love that sustained them. Growing up in the 1960s in the suburbs of Chicago, Meg Kissinger's family seemed to live a charmed life. With eight kids and two loving parents, the Kissingers radiated a warm, boisterous energy. Whether they were spending summer days on the shores of Lake Michigan, barreling down the ski slopes, or navigating the trials of their Catholic school, the Kissingers always knew how to live large and play hard. But behind closed doors, a harsher reality was unfolding. A heavily-medicated mother hospitalized for anxiety and depression, a manic father prone to violence, and children in the throes of bipolar disorder and depression, two of whom would take their own lives. Through it all, the Kissingers faced the world with their signature dark humor and the unspoken family rule--never talk about it. While You Were Out begins as the personal story of one family's struggles, then opens outward as Kissinger details how childhood tragedy catalyzed a journalism career focused on exposing our country's flawed mental health care. Combining the intimacy of memoir with the rigor of investigative reporting, the book explores the consequences of shame, the havoc of botched public policy, and the hope offered by new treatment strategies. This is a story of one family's love and devotion in the face of relentless struggle. It is a book for anyone who cares about someone with mental illness. In other words, it is a book for everyone"-- Provided by publisher.
The Night Parade
A Speculative Memoir
Published in 2023
In this genre-bending and deeply emotional memoir that mirrors the sensation of being caught between realms, the author, after the death of her father, grapples with her bipolar disorder and sets out to interrogate the very notion of recovery through thelens of figures from Japanese, Taiwanese and Okinawan legend.
I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki
Published in 2022
"A successful young social media director at a publishing house chronicles her ten years of psychiatric treatment for depression and she fought back against the harmful behaviors that kept her locked in a cycle of self-abuse"-- Provided by publisher.
A Life in Light
Meditations on Impermanence
Published in 2022
From the bestselling author of Women Rowing North and Reviving Ophelia-a memoir in essays reflecting on radiance, resilience, and the constantly changing nature of reality. In her luminous new memoir in essays, Mary Pipher-as she did in her New York Times bestseller Women Rowing North-taps into a cultural moment, to offer wisdom, hope, and insight into loss and change. Drawing from her own experiences and expertise as a psychologist specializing in women, trauma, and the effect of our culture on our mental health, she looks inward in A Life in Light to what shaped her as a woman, one who has experienced darkness throughout her life but was always drawn to the light. Her plainspoken depictions of her hard childhood and life's difficulties are dappled with moments of joy and revelation, tragedies and ordinary miseries, glimmers and shadow. As a child, she was separated from her parents for long periods. Those separations affected her deeply, but in A Life in Light she explores what she's learned about how to balance despair with joy, utilizing and sharing with readers every coping skill she has honed during her lifetime to remind us that there is a silver thread of resilience that flows through all of life, and that despite our despair, the light will return. In this book, she points us toward that light.
Never Simple
Published in 2022
"A darkly funny and devastating memoir of growing up in '90s Manhattan with a mentally ill single parent"-- Provided by publisher.
The Absent Moon
A Memoir of a Short Childhood and a Long Depression
Published in 2023
"A literary sensation in Brazil and now a global publishing event, Luiz Schwarcz's wise and tender memoir bravely interrogates the story of his own ordeal of depression in the context of a family story of murder, dispossession, and silence-the long echo of the Holocaust across generations When Luiz Schwarcz was a child, he was told little about his grandfather and namesake Láios-"Luiz" in Hungarian. Only later would he learn that his grandfather, a devout Hungarian Jew, had defied his country's Nazi occupiers by holding secret religious services in his home and, after being put on a train to a German death camp with his son André, had ordered André to leap from the train to freedom at a rail crossing while Láios himself was carried on to his death. What Luiz did know was that his father was a very unhappy man, and his melancholia haunted the house. The noise that defined childhood for Luiz was that of his father in the next bedroom, tortured by insomnia, striking his foot against the bed post, seemingly for hours, night after night. Young Luiz assumed responsibility for his parents' happiness, as many children of trauma do, and for a time he seemed to be succeeding: he blossomed into the family prodigy, becoming an outwardly gregarious, athletic, and academically successful young man, eventually growing into a literary publisher of great promise. His house was still filled with silence, but he found a home in that silence-a home that he filled with books and with reading. But then, at a high point of outward success, Luiz was brought low by a devastating mental breakdown against which his resources were pitifully inadequate. The Absent Moon is in part the story of his journey to that point and in part his journey back from it, as Luiz learned to forge a different, more honest relationship with his own mind, with his family, and with their shared past. The culmination of that path is this extraordinary book, which is beautiful, tragic, noble, piercingly honest, and ultimately redemptive-the product of a lifetime's reflection, animated by love and compassion and given powerful literary shape in the refiner's fire by a master storyteller"-- Provided by publisher.
This Will All Be over Soon
A Memoir
Published in 2021
"A powerful memoir from the Saturday Night Live cast member Cecily Strong about grieving the death of her cousin-and embracing the life-affirming lessons he taught her-amid the coronavirus pandemic"-- Provided by publisher.