The most recommended books about psychiatric hospitals

This is another novel written expressly for teenagers, and all the better for it.

Inflected by the author’s own autobiographical experiences—like Craig, the novel’s narrator, Vizzini spent a week in a psychiatric hospital as a teenager—It’s Kind of a Funny Story was the first work of fiction I’d read that articulated the adolescent experience through the language of mental health. It was here that I learned “depression” isn’t an abstracted emotion but the very real neurochemical imbalance that impels Craig to call the suicide hotline after abandoning his SSRIs.

There’s an uncanny familiarity to the circumstances of Craig’s breakdown—namely in how he struggles to remain above water at a famously rigorous college preparatory high school—and a fundamental earnestness to his story’s confessions that gilds even its grimmest moments with a fifteen-year-old's sense of impressionable wonder.

Set in 19th century England, this novel is aimed at Young Adult readers and is a reminder that a good read is simply good, whatever age bracket it’s aimed at. It resonated with my own teenage struggles to break free of restrictive expectations – even though mine were trifling compared to what the heroine Louisa has to go through! She resists the restrictions of Victorian society and the limited choices available to women, and is locked up in an asylum. It prompted me to read more about the era and discovered the shocking truth of how this really happened to women who stepped out of line…

Focusing on a deeply disturbed serial killer, this book got under my skin! I felt such a wide range of emotions reading this, from fascination to fear and shock, and couldn’t stop turning the page. Although the central character, detective Joona Linna, features in all the Kepler books, this book can be read as a stand-alone. 

In my own precious novel-reading time, I have found myself turning to books that look frankly and fondly at familial imperfection.

This book by Miriam Toews follows Hattie, her 11-year-old niece Thebes, and her 15-year-old nephew Logan as they cross the US in a dilapidated camper van, looking for the kids’ father.

Toews combines comedy with proper heartbreak to remind us that, in a messed-up world, we are sustained by the love of our families–flaws and all.

This classic account by a renowned sociologist is critical reading for those interested in the anti-psychiatry movement, a crusade that viewed psychiatry as more coercive than therapeutic and, in some cases, questioned the reality of mental illness itself. For one year, Goffman embedded himself in St. Elizabeth’s mental hospital in Washington, DC, where he ultimately concluded that the defining features of the asylum – similar to those of prisons and other “total institutions” – did more to shape the patient’s behavior than the supposed illness for which the patient had been admitted in the first place. Goffman’s observations left a significant impact on popular ideas about asylum care and helped contribute to widespread deinstitutionalization several decades later.

Faces in the Water was first published in 1961, though it received far less attention and acclaim. The “story,” such as it is, is narrated by Istina Mavet, a shy, introverted young woman (again, based closely on the author) who, like the author, spends ten years in a New Zealand psychiatric hospital. Faces in the Water recounts long, dull years of cruelty and suffering. But don’t let this put you off—Frame’s style is marvelously poetic. The narrative is abstract in places and was at first difficult for me to get into, but once I began to see things from Istina’s perspective, the story came to life, and I found it brutally beautiful. 

Before I read Garnethill, my perception of the typical Glasgow crime novel protagonist was that of the hard-drinking, rule-breaking, middle-aged, divorced male detective – in other words, the usual cliché. Maureen O’Donnell shatters that. A survivor of childhood abuse, she’s treated as an unreliable eyewitness and potential murder suspect due to her mental health history and turns detective to entrap and unmask a killer who’s been targeting others like her – women whose voices are ignored because they’re deemed to be “crazy”. Packed with colourful characters and raw, angry prose, Denise Mina’s debut novel has a rough-and-ready quality compared to her later work, but which is entirely suited to the subject matter – a defiant battle cry against both the men who abuse their power and those who look the other way.

The Cornish Captive makes a powerful portrayal of abduction and imprisonment, as well as describing the forces of mental stress under the elemental pressures of Cornish life of that time. Cornish society then was unbelievably brutal. I identify so strongly with the sufferings of any sensitive soul under those conditions.

McCarthy was perhaps the greatest living American writer until his passing on June 13, 2023. Born in 1933, he published Stella Maris in December 2022, which was his final work and a companion piece to The Passenger, released just six weeks prior.

Stella Maris is a brief work composed entirely of dialogue between Alicia Western—"a twenty-year-old Jewish-Caucasian female. Attractive, possibly anorexic. She arrived at the facility six days ago, seemingly by bus and without luggage"—and her therapist. Their discussions span topics from her life and traumas to the foundations of mathematics, Los Alamos, solipsism, Platonism, and Amati violins, to name a few.

While McCarthy was neither a mathematician nor a physicist, he spent considerable time with scientists at the Santa Fe Institute. As a result, his references to math, logic, or physics never seem amiss. 

I first read The Passenger, then read Stella Maris — twice.… show more.

As a young man, Ken Kesey worked as an orderly in a psychiatric ward and participated in CIA-funded hallucinogen studies conducted in the hospital. Looking out at the patients and nurses, he wondered what separated them.

What emerged from those experiences is the mesmeric narrator of his first book: the giant, Chief, sees the world through a terrifying poetic lens. Observant and cunning, he perceives all the forces of authority and conformity as a single machine he calls “The Combine.”

Kesey’s novel is a fable about the power of the individual to oppose any coercive larger force, even if victory isn’t certain. It’s dark, unflinching, and profoundly on the side of the freaks.