82 books like Crime, Punishment, and Mental Illness

This book differs from the others on my “best books” list. This one doesn’t deal (directly) with the convergences of mental illness and criminal justice institutions and policies. However, it provides extraordinary insight into the many ways in which mental health/illness has been understood in diverse societies around the world and into the power of American ideas and treatments to eradicate that diversity within incredibly brief periods of time.

This book has great chapters on the rise of anorexia in Hong Kong, changing responses to schizophrenia in Zanzibar, and the marketing of depression in Japan. But the chapter that most spoke to me is “The Wave that Brought PTSD to Sri Lanka.” In this chapter Watters traces how American mental health professionals responded to the enormous, disastrous tsunami that wiped out entire towns in 2004. In a nutshell, while American mental health professionals focused on PTSD, Sri Lankans were more… show more.

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.

I love well-written memoirs that allow me insight into real people and, at the same time, shed light on broader social problems that often are hidden. In this book, Pete Earley manages the incredibly complicated job of telling the story of his son (who broke into a neighbor’s house while amid a mental illness crisis), his own story as a father trying to help his son navigate both the mental health system and the criminal justice system, and the story of his observations as a journalist inside the Miami-Dade County jail.

By the end of the book, I felt I had experienced the privilege of getting to know Pete’s son, peeking inside Pete’s head, and seeing what commonly goes on as thousands of Americans cycle through the revolving doors of mental health and carceral institutions. Perhaps because my own research is with people who do not have many advantages in… 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.

Based on the authentic voices of doctors, prisoners and legal personnel who appeared at London’s central criminal court, the Old Bailey, the book charts the development of forensic psychiatry as a field of medical expertise. Terms like melancholia, mania and delusion were so adaptable that they could be used to account for apparently motiveless crimes, including murder. Judges, juries, doctors and lawyers focused on establishing what a prisoner knew they were doing and would likely have believed about the outcome of the act, revealing the medico-legal foundations of the modern insanity defense.

One of several Lamott non-fiction works that we love, you’ll return to this slim volume many times over for a witty, warming shot of wisdom. With a familiar mix of the philosophical, autobiographical, and anecdotal, Lamott provides a refreshing perspective on coping with hopelessness and suffering, both private and public. For Lamott, meaning comes from ‘living stitch by stitch' and protects us from being overwhelmed by the world’s problems (or our own). Through hard topics including her own addiction and losses, the author testifies to the power of hope and community. Like a therapist or forensic psychiatrist, Lamott talks of the import of bearing witness to the suffering of others, as a path to change.

This is one of my new favorite authors, of who I have read many more of her books recently. I like books like this that contain twists and turns and endings that you don’t see coming. Most of her books are in the domestic thriller or psychological suspense thriller categories. These are the type of books that I read(and write) most.

This is a unique entry in that the cursed place is a framing device, for this collection of mostly disturbing tales. For his first-ever collection of short stories, Palahniuk brings his wretched cast of characters to a haunted house, where each in turn offers his or her own demented tale. They don’t all work, but a number of the stories really stick with you, and this spooky old house at the center of it ratchets the intensity up another level—it’s not a static situation they are in, there, so the plot progresses to its own warped conclusion on this front as well. 

The Big Book of Hell is the holy grail of dark humor, packaged perfectly in a comic format. Growing up as a sarcastic kid from Brooklyn, this was the first humor book I read that I felt was aimed directly at my sensibilities. It has a very unique “substance-over-style” aesthetic that is striking and somehow managed to become widely identifiable. It dances around subjects, poking fun at the absurdities of the world it was written in. It really showed me that you don’t need to be a conventionally great artist to publish comics and that there is a market for dark humor comics. The book, which reads almost like a variety show, opened my eyes to ways to play with structure of an individual comic and a whole book.

I gotta say, Noel-Anne Brennan needs to be better known.

This book (along with its sequel, The Blood of the Land) makes up a compelling duology featuring Rilsin, the rightful ruler of her country, who pledges the throne to her cousin Sithli in an effort to stop the bloodshed in her land.

But her cousin is insane and could care less about being a good ruler, which means Rilsin may need to break her promise to help her country—except Sithli also holds Rilsin’s baby hostage.

Wonderful, strong characters, an engaging story, super easy to read. What more could you ask for? If you decide to read this, set aside a few uninterrupted hours. You can thank me later. :)