100 books like Hidden Valley Road

Instead of starting with the question, "How can I change my child's behavior?" Andrew Solomon starts by asking, "How does my child experience the world?"

He tells the stories of parents who have struggled to accept that their children are profoundly different from them and offers a deeply optimistic view of relationships and family. This book takes a fascinating dive into different ways of being human – among them, deafness, dwarfism, transgenderism, autism – and inspires us to look at our children through new eyes.

It can be incredibly frustrating to try to talk about how broken the mental healthcare system is (especially in the United States). Most people have no frame of reference for it.

Similarly the impact mental illness can have on family and loved ones is, for many, uncharted territory. Enter No One Care About Crazy People.

Powers expertly weaves the history of mental healthcare in America together with the story of his family’s battles with schizophrenia. The result is a heartbreaking and beautiful and horrifying and eye-opening book that leaves you better equipped to have those frustrating conversations. 

I’m not going to lie to you, this is a hard one to read. It hurts. That said, it is one of my all-time favorite books.

Robert Whitaker’s books inform my work. Both Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic provided crucial policy background as I searched for my brother's personhood. Whitaker’s deep research and ferocious insistence that we rethink psychiatric care guided me into the world of mental illness, the history of treatment, and the controversy over forcing medication on unwilling people. I sympathize with Whitaker and the people who believe anti-psychotics make things worse. But I also meet many with diagnoses who believe in the mantra, “take your meds.” Best practices cannot be one-size (pill)-fits all. I end my own book by imagining the best possible world for mental health treatment—guided both by Whitaker and his most vehement critic, E. Fuller Torrey.

When I began my book, I wanted to know who my mother was at 22, when she left a brief disaster of a first marriage with an infant—my brother, Mike. Mom grew up in Montana, embedded in immigrant Jewish life. My great-uncle, Myron Brinig, wrote about that life and our family in Singermann, his first book (now, alas, an obscure classic available mostly in libraries). In early drafts of my book, I included far too much family history, with Myron as my guide. I loved the detail; my early readers did not. So my published book stays close to the core emotional story. And yet Singermann opens a window not just on our family but others with complicated immigration stories, dark secrets, and intergenerational mental illness.

Before my sister became so ill, people used to say we looked alike. But ours was just a resemblance. In this novel, Dominick looks exactly like his brother, who has schizophrenia. Dominick encounters his identical twin every time he looks in a mirror. And he is terrified.

I first read this book 25 years ago and inhaled every one of the intertwined subplots in its 900 + pages. Recently, I re-read the “story within the story,” a memoir by Dominick’s grandfather. I became fascinated by his story about the Sicilian market where one chicken transforms into two whole ones—a bit of magical realism about twinning, schizophrenia, and hope. I too excavated old family documents to understand why my sibling suffered so much.

I first read this book in graduate school, and it completely changed the way I think about schizophrenia and the daily experience of living with a mental illness.

This memoir chronicles Saks’ experiences attending Oxford University and then Yale Law School with ever more progressive symptoms of schizophrenia; she details her therapy sessions as she worked closely with a psychoanalyst and then the journey to study psychoanalysis herself. I was captivated by Saks’ experience and her skilled storytelling.

Schizophrenia is a mental illness that most commonly emerges in the Quarterlife years and frequently after people have gone away to college. This book is a gift to understanding this experience more fully or for those who want to feel less alone in the struggle with mental and emotional anguish during this time of life. 

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s son, Mark, wrote this semi-fictional exploratory piece in an autobiographical style while exploring the nature of drug-induced madness coupled with undiagnosed schizophrenia while living an alternative lifestyle in a working commune. Through it all, the nature of humanity is questioned in a humorously chaotic way. And yet he pulls it all together to somehow not only make sense of, but also be enlightened by, the madness of this counterculture lifestyle. 

Mark Vonnegut later returns to university and obtains a medical degree while exploring the use of orthomolecular medicine as a treatment to combat schizophrenia. While successfully obtaining his medical degree, he eventually disavows orthomolecular therapy as a plausible treatment.

A stunning biography of a brilliant mathematician, John Forbes Nash, and his descent and resurrection from madness, that became a hit movie.

Nasar makes both the mathematics and the personality of an early, unusual and important game theorist come alive for even the most math-adverse reader. This is an unusual account of recovery, of a mind apprehending the world of human competition, and a poetical love and coming-of-age story.

Lily’s mom has schizophrenia and Lily is terrified that she might get it too. Lily gets personally involved in a story at her newspaper internship about an abandoned elephant calf. Feeling a kinship with the elephant, Lily goes through extraordinary lengths to make sure the calf finds a safe home, while at the same time, realizing that she has begun to show signs of mental illness. Fischer combines mental illness, family, friendship, and animal welfare into a riveting, thought-provoking book. I loved how she showed the reader how a character can live with the early stages of schizophrenia without losing her sense of self and purpose. 

Originally published in 1964 under the pen name Hannah Green, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden is a bleak but beautifully-written book that has recently been reissued after some time out of print. It tells the story of Deborah Blau, 16, incarcerated in a psychiatric hospital after being diagnosed with schizophrenia. The book is a thinly-disguised autobiographical account; Greenberg spent years at Maryland’s Chestnut Lodge, where she was helped in her recovery by the understanding and unconventional therapy provided by Freida Fromm-Reichman (Dr. Fried in the book). Much of the time, Deborah retreats into her own world, with its own language, gods, and history. The book helped me to understand why a person might elect to live in their own mind, where their world, although dark, is at least within their control.