The best empowering personal stories of mental illness

There are many useful, informative books about mental health, but I love a beautifully written story—the kind that pulls you into the world of real people and the ways that their mental health challenges shape their lives. Such is the case with this creative, experimental memoir, which follows a son into adulthood as he witnesses his father’s addiction and homelessness while also developing his own addiction problems, bringing their warped reality to life by warping the narrative itself. With chapters written in wildly different forms and approaches, it slowly builds into a story of self-discovery and tentative acceptance. Full of grit, pathos, and harsh beauty, it captures a pervasive quality of mental chaos while also finding a clear path through it.

This collection of interconnected essays, which explores writer Susanne Antonetta’s experience of living with bipolar disorder from myriad angles, is rife with facts and insights as well as her own idiosyncratic artistry. Through examinations of everything from the history of consciousness to the concept of neurodiversity, Antonetta humanizes her diagnosis and delves into the multiplicity of ways that it has informed her personal and professional life. Neither shying away from the difficulties nor dismissing the gifts that mania confers (such as her photographic memory for Shakespeare’s plays), she flips the script on stereotypes and offers an empowering take on what it means to live, and thrive, while managing a serious mental illness.

This lyrical, book-length essay is a meditation not so much on a diagnosis as on one of its most visible expressions—tears. Exploring depression through the lens of the phenomenon of crying, The Crying Book is loaded with facts both esoteric and banal. Yet it is also deeply personalized by author Heather Christle’s reflections on her own struggles with depressive episodes, as well as on the deaths of other poets to suicide, and the allure and danger of romanticizing such acts. Christle’s loose, fragmentary approach gives her the freedom to wander far and wide as she considers the art and act of crying, allowing depression to surface as an experience that is at once individual and deeply embedded in its cultural and historical contexts.

In this intensively researched memoir, celebrated war reporter Jessica Stern turns her journalistic eye on herself, peering far into her past to examine a rape to which she was a victim as a teen—an event that caused her to develop post-traumatic stress disorder and dramatically altered the course of her life. She uses her personal story as the anchor from which to more broadly examine how we think about trauma, interviewing veterans and others to explore how PTSD damages personal relationships while also contributing, for instance, to the “fearlessness” that enabled her to work in war zones. In doing so, Stern delivers a well-rounded examination of her condition with insights on why so many, including herself, are apt to deny its presence in their own lives. 

In this clear-eyed series of essays about living with a form of schizophrenia, author Esmé Weijun Wang leverages her own stories to expose and critique the ways she has been misunderstood and condemned for her illness. Sharing anecdotes about life as an inpatient, as a student, and as a wife, she reveals the ways she compensates for the delusions and hallucinations that plague her, as well as the sense of separation and exclusion that these symptoms and others’ attitudes engender. Often foregrounding the intensity of her many challenges and openly confronting her uncertainty about her future, she nonetheless writes with a nuanced, thoughtful voice—a potent and compelling approach that, despite her circumstances, is ultimately hopeful.