100 books like Closing The Asylum

This is another Victorian Broadmoor book and also one that lives well beyond the walls. William Chester Minor, a wealthy and educated New Englander, was a Broadmoor patient who dedicated his hospital life to assisting with the first Oxford English Dictionary. Simon Winchester weaves together Minor’s story with that of James Murray: two eccentric obsessives who bond over common labour. The book puts the idea of criminal lunacy into a wider perspective and also succeeds in making a potentially dry, academic topic into a page-turning read.

Although Kate Summerscale is best known for The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, this is a book to read for those interested in mental illness and crime. The boy of the title is indeed a child – one who killed his mother and entered the asylum at the age of eighteen. The influence of Victorian social media – the penny dreadfuls and sensational journalism – feels relevant as today’s youth are lambasted for similar fascinations. The story ends far from Broadmoor and provides hope of recovery from even the most desperate and tragic situations.

I like to write about public Victorian asylums – where the bulk of English people with mental illnesses were admitted.  But the counterpoint is the private system, where the poor, rich mad spent their time in nice surroundings with wacky treatments. Sarah Wise captures this perfectly through a real-life investigation of the people in the attic – think Jane Eyre, or The Woman in White – and how the law sought to protect them.

Long before the Victorian asylums, there was Bethlem – London’s ancient hospital for lunatics. Like Broadmoor, Bethlem also looked after high-profile criminals, but within a private and charitable institution that was mostly for the capital’s waifs and strays. Bedlam gives you a sense of how mental health developed as a concept from the medieval period to the present day.

The prose style in the memoir, Girl, Interrupted, is clean, concise, and unembellished. The spare writing leaves no room for self-pity, yet still tells a vivid story of mental unraveling and convalescence concurrently. Kaysen meets a cast of vulnerable characters during her nearly year-long commitment in a psychiatric hospital. They form unlikely friendships, and we get to know all of their various neuroses in a stifling environment that is at once a cage and a path to self-discovery and health. 

I was reminded of my own two commitments to psychiatric hospitals, how strange and austere the world became in those weeks, how time became irrelevant with the breakfast, lunch and dinner announcements, medication time, nightly bed checks, and the ironic “fresh air breaks,” on the back steps of the ward where I and my own unlikely cast of characters smoked cigarettes and commiserated about our unique predicaments. 

I was… show more.

I once worked on a film shoot at the infamous Friern Barnet Asylum in London, an imposing building that boasts the longest corridor in Europe at over a third of a mile long. It was my job to lock up after filming was over each night, and to do so, I had to walk the long corridor with just a flashlight for company… and the ghosts rumoured to haunt the building! I have never forgotten the feeling of dread and despair in that place, and my heart went out to the patients who were isolated in the creepy basement wards. Barbara Taylor gives an inside perspective on this fearsome institution in her book, which is both an achingly honest account of mental illness and addiction, and a critique of community care.

We've reached the only actual “how to do mental illness” book on this list and it’s an all time favorite of mine.

Skoczen is not a doctor or a therapist and isn’t afraid to drop a couple of f-bombs when talking about mental health… so, yeah, he’s a lot like me, which may be part of why I love this book so much.

Engaging, reassuring, and full of concrete strategies for navigating depression both as someone with it and as someone who loves someone with it, I have recommended this book for years. 

Legions of regular folks have grown up with parents or caretakers who were emotionally immature or unskilled. These family-of-origin deficits may or may not have met the criteria for outright abuse but caused lasting emotional harm to the kids. I love that this book uses clear language and validates the reality of countless readers.

A guide like this book explains unhelpful familial behavior patterns and explores ways to liberate the reader from automatically repeating dysfunctional history. Book clubs are springing up worldwide about this book. It’s also valuable to me in defining emotionally immature parents not as bad people but as people who lack the insight and skills to provide an emotionally supportive and healthy home.

Changing maladaptive family-of-origin patterns is incredibly hard work, and this gentle guide is a great intro to understanding the past to evolve an emotionally healthier present and future.

Brittainy Cherry’s work never fails to sweep me off my feet and pull me in with its lyricism, grace, and depth. She’s truly a poet, and this story about two musicians as in love with their craft as they are with each other brings out some of her most stunning writing yet. Behind the Bars takes us on a journey through the hero and heroine’s childhoods all the way up to their reunion as adults. Along the way, they face some dark moments and deal with topics including bullying, loss, grief, and dysfunctional family relationships. These moments are real and raw, and instead of sensationalizing or romanticizing them, Brittainy Cherry uses them to show that life can be beautiful and ugly all at once, and that we can always reach out and find the help we need to let a little more beautiful in.

I’ve read this book about a dozen times in the past fifteen years, and I find new nuggets of wisdom with each visit. I was first convinced that I could overcome anxiety by reading Dr. Low’s strong conviction that there are no hopeless cases. He breaks down the root causes of mental health issues and describes cognitive-behavioral techniques for overcoming anger, negative judgments against oneself, fears, interpersonal conflicts, and many other ailments. His pithy sayings are easy to remember and have become the backbone of the self-help program Recovery International. Written in the 1950s, the examples and language can be somewhat dated – such as streetcars, elevator operators, and clotheslines – but his great love for his patients and his understanding of the human mind are timeless.