Fans pick 100 books like Crazy

I found it fascinating to read Ethan Watters’ analysis of how American concepts of mental illness are exported and globalized, usually with disastrous consequences.

During a cultural moment when social justice, cultural relativism, and imperialism have entered the public consciousness, this book is more relevant than ever. With its focus on mental health labels and diagnoses, specifically, this book helped me understand how our notions of illness, psychological distress, and mental health don’t necessarily translate into other societies.

I loved thinking about familiar diagnoses here in the US, such as anorexia, depression, and PTSD, and reading about well-meaning initiatives that bring these labels into foreign contexts. By attempting to superimpose our conception of mental illness onto people in other countries, we inadvertently diminish the social networks and resilience of the societies we aim to help.

As a therapist who is sometimes weary of our cultural stories about psychological suffering, this… show more.

More than anything else I have read, this book helped me understand the relationship between crime and mental illness in the United States. The book explore some really fascinating case studies (for example, school shooter Kip Kinkel).

But the bigger contribution is how the authors sort out the core ideological approaches of the law versus the social sciences (including psychology and psychiatry.) They show how the law is rooted in philosophical and religious ideas about good, evil, and free will. In contrast, the social sciences use complex empirical observations and theories to explain human behavior.

The best chapter, in my opinion, is “The ‘Mad’ or ‘Bad’ Debate Concerning Sex Offenders.” It is the only thing I’ve ever read that has helped me understand why our society singles out sex offenders for demonization.

I cannot get Shayne’s story out of my mind! It tells the stories of six very different individuals from diverse backgrounds with various access to health care and other resources. All six struggle with mental illness. And all six end up incarcerated and, finally, dead. But it’s Shayne’s story that I (and my students) can’t stop thinking about.

Shayne was a bright and beautiful child who grew up in a close and loving family. By the time she was eleven, Shayne had begun to make inappropriate comments, sneak out of her house at night, and lose interest in school. At age fourteen, she was found in a park with a young man and some beer. She refused to tell her therapist what she had been doing there but mentioned that she felt people could read her mind. A physician who met her just the one time diagnosed her as psychotic… show more.

Before I read this book, I had only the vaguest idea of what happens in supermax prisons or even solitary confinement in regular prisons. In this book, Rhodes shares her observations of a maximum-security prison–really inside. She had incredible access to the guards, the cell blocks, and the prisoners.

I already knew that Rhodes is a brilliant anthropologist–I loved her book Emptying Beds: The Work of an Emergency Psychiatric Unit (the bit that has stayed in my mind is the practice of offering patients a one-way ticket to California to get these pesty mentally ill, homeless people out of the overcrowded Chicago unit).

This book is, in some ways, the next step in that story, but in some ways, the opposite. Where the emergency unit tried to get rid of patients, the supermax prison tried to hold onto them. I was especially fascinated by the detailed descriptions of interactions between… show more.

Maybe it’s because, as a woman who worked in a historically male-dominated industry, I always root for the underdog—be it a newbie with the chutzpah to say no to a pushy buyer or a small town fighting off a huge conglomerate. Give me a character who is a caricature of an amusement park scion, dialog dripping with sarcasm, and a zany plot that spits in the eye of corporate America.

I led the applause as S. V. Date gleefully poked fun at the greediness of big business while indicting a state government that, for a price, was more than happy to go along for the ride.

This love story is unique. Zee is a hot-tempered drug dealer with a damaged leg. Sir Gentry is a sweet guy on the autism spectrum who hears voices, thinks he’s her Medieval champion, and talks only in Middle English. But lack of judgment, understanding, and compassion make them equals in love.

In many ways, my book is a prologue to Robert Kolker’s extraordinary book. When Mike left our home, he moved to the Colorado State Hospital, in 1957, just a few years before the Galvin brothers began to rotate through the same wards. My mother dealt with the guilt and shame, stigma and chaos of one child with schizophrenia. The Galvins had ten boys and two girls, and six of the boys were diagnosed with schizophrenia. Unimaginable. I feel especially close to their story because I went to college in Colorado Springs. I rode my bike near the Galvin home on Hidden Valley Road. Even the brain research ending Kolker’s book on a note of hope happens in Denver at the University of Colorado. Like mine, this is a Colorado story. 

In all honesty, what I liked most about this book is out of all the books I’ve read about mental illness, this one comes closest to my own book.  

It looks at the ramifications of mental illness through the gaze of a person that loves the main character. In the case of this book, it is two Asian American sisters: Lucia and Miranda.  

Lucia, like many people with a mental health diagnosis, like the character Bowie in my novel, suffers from anosognosia - a lack of insight about having a mental illness; making her oppositional to any treatment that would help level off her symptoms. Mira T. Lee compellingly describes the arrogance of ‘experts’ who know nothing about Lucia, ignoring the well-informed input from Miranda, prescribing meds that Miranda already knows from experience will have adverse effects. 

The book also examines how people with severe mental illness endure shifting diagnoses:… show more.

I typically don’t read YA, but I’d just finished writing a book about searching for an ancient shipwreck, so I thought, why not see what someone else did with this idea? And I’m so glad I did. Otherwise I would have missed out on this compelling inner journey of a teenager who tries on adult responsibility and explores who she wants to be: someone who flees, breaks down, acts out, steps up, reaches for meaningful connection, or (and) loves.

I fell in love with Martha, the main character who is struggling with an unnamed depression and who because of this assumes she can never be a good mother. She is so surprising and real and sad and impossible to love and funny—I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough to see if things would work out for her.