The best books about psychosis

As a kid, I accidentally memorized the first three or four paragraphs of Edgar Allen Poe’s "The Tell-Tale Heart". My memory is not as great as it used to be but my love for odd, tragic figures still remains. I love this book. It’s rhapsodic, mesmerizing, and spellbinding. It’s also bitter and obsessive. Give me a bitter character and I am hooked. The protagonist Colin is crippled and very cynical about humanity. He finds a seal on the shore and identifies with it. Perhaps because it’s clumsy on land but so graceful in water. His obsession with the seal made me somewhat uncomfortable but maybe that’s just my mind working overtime. After a while, his obsession leads him to become obsessed with living underwater. This is where the seal lives, this is where his true family lives. Now, not all disabled characters—mercifully—are vaguely psychotic. And imagination is a… show more.

The Divided Self kick-started my search for the truth of the human condition. It taught me that I didn't have to follow the life laid out for me and that I was expected to follow. Through it I discovered that I was not the only person trapped in a world and struggling to make sense of the bizarre and contradictory reality around me, that lied and lied about existence continually. Further books by him reinforced this awareness of the illogic of it all, including The Politics of Experience, The Self and Others, and Knots. I was Brer Rabbit, caught in the honey trap of the tar baby and this book showed me that.

This book will make you question everything you’ve ever thought about your sanity.

The incredible true story of Susannah Cahalan took the world by storm when it topped the charts to #1 New York Times Bestseller and was made into a film. Cahalan’s intense journey from New York Post investigative reporter to psychiatric lockdown patient spans only one month, a month that nearly ended her life.

A reader once described my books as ‘unputdownable,’ and I’m happy to share that label with Brain on Fire. Riveting, frightening, and incredibly moving, I couldn’t read quickly enough as Susannah fought to reclaim her sanity and her life.

Based on her article “The Month of Madness,” this book is one of the best about a young woman’s struggle to find and reclaim herself.

Wong's book is a gut-punching yet hilarious memoir about the Chinese immigrant experience and the searing impact of mental illness that left me with an overwhelming it-could-have-been-worse feeling. But seriously, the value in books like these is they make those in truly terrible situations know they aren't alone. That itself—that feeling of being seen—can keep one going. This book also reminded me of the importance of setting boundaries with family members--a lesson I could have used far earlier in my life. Yay for Wong, a beloved Canadian writer and writing instructor, for triumphing (like Lizzie) in the end! 

What would happen if instead of throwing people into jail-like mental wards and hammering them with tranquilizing drugs, we instead welcomed them into home-like settings and spent time listening and caring, patiently giving them time and space to explore the emotional roots of their crisis? Psychiatrist Loren Mosher did just that in the Soteria House research project in the 1970s and 80s, and the results were clear: people do better without medications and with listening and caring in a safe environment instead.

Mosher was the first chief of the Center for Studies of Schizophrenia of the National Institutes of Mental Health but you’ve probably never heard of him – his innovative project proved that psychosis can be healed more effectively without medication and outside of  hospitals, but came at a time when biological and pharmaceutical solutions – and the profits they generate – came to dominate psychiatry, so he was… show more.

Okay, so the title already has you frowning. Stay with me here. This indie ebook novelette had me smiling, nodding, and ooo-ing. I loved the brave way the author attempted something new and, well, left field. Because this is a lot of left field…

Our main character is a hitman. Or is he? He’s a werewolf. Or is he? I loved every paragraph of this story’s prose. But it was this “what’s really going on here?” aspect that had me smiling all the way through. It reminded me of Mad Max: Fury Road—because you can watch that entire movie as a psychotic episode on Max’s part. Same with this book. Leaves you guessing until the last page while keeping things fun along the way.

My book starts with a series of conversations with people who have psychosis and hear voices. Some people described to me a particularly unusual experience: the feeling of a voice being there, even when it wasn’t speaking.

As an undergraduate student one of the books that first got me thinking about these topics was Richard Bentall’s Madness Explained. It really opened my eyes to the possibilities of the mind and how we can think about experiences like hallucinations without necessarily pathologizing them.

This book was my gateway to then learning about things like the International Hearing Voices moment, which argues against an overly medicalized understanding of unusual experiences like voice-hearing. My book is quite wide-ranging, but I’ve tried to retain some of the ethos of Madness Explained in how I’ve approached the world of uncanny presences. 

This is more literary than crime but Chandler has at the heart of her book a woman with serious mental illness; she captures the soul of a troubled woman and the rippling effects of past and psychosis, as well as the vagaries of memory. And there is a mystery to work out; it was short-listed for the Sisters in Crime Davitt’s award.

This book explores grief tied together with a mysterious death. Holly received ominous, out-of-character messages from her brother before he suddenly took his own life, leaving her to try to figure out the truth of his violent death while working through her own grief.

She finds herself moving in with Dane’s girlfriend, Maura, in her gothic, haunting townhouse, hoping to get clues and to see her own grief reflected in the other woman’s. And while this grief does bring them together, the shallowness and violence of Maura’s mourning makes it clear that she knows more about Dane’s death than she’s sharing.

This is a story of how grief can become the haunted thing that lurks in gothic halls, and the extremes that it can drive people to, completely upending one’s world.

Hearing voices is considered a symptom of schizophrenia and can quickly lead to hospital lockup, medication, and being shunned by society as “mentally ill.” In this fascinating account, Smith reveals the truth about this experience we call “madness” – hearing voices is actually a normal human experience across history and culture. Poets, religious visionaries, people spending time alone or grieving – even Freud, Gandhi, actor Anthony Hopkins, singer Lady Gaga -- all heard voices, and anyone under the right kind of stress can hear voices. The problem only arises when people hear distressing voices and have nowhere to go for help other than being treated as ill by a doctor.

Psychiatry made the catastrophic mistake of calling homosexuality a mental disease, and for many decades LGBT people were abducted, confined in hospitals, drugged, tortured, and killed for the mental crime of being different. Today people who hear voices are also… show more.

This memoir of postpartum psychosis is not for the faint of heart, but is an absolutely necessary addition to the motherhood literary canon. In beautiful prose, it charts the author’s increasing mental instability following the birth of her son. These are the types of stories that should be shared more frequently to reduce the stigma of perinatal mood disorders. 

I found Rethinking Madness to be a highly original book. Clinical psychologist Paris Williams interviewed individuals who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and other psychoses, and he integrated this research with prominent alternative explanations for madness. In contrast to the gloomy picture painted by establishment psychiatry, Williams describes how full recovery from schizophrenia and other related psychotic disorders is not only possible but is surprisingly common, and that many people who recover from these psychotic disorders do not merely return to their pre-psychotic condition, but often undergo a profound positive transformation with far more lasting benefits than harms.

Pat Cadigan is one of my favourite authors. Mindplayers is a short book, bizarre and strange but fascinating as per Cadigan’s style. The main setting here is the human mind. The protagonist is forced to become a Mindplayer, a sort of state-controlled psychologist who jacks into people’s minds in order to cure them. This book makes you wonder how vast the world inside your head is, and if your thoughts and memories really belong to you once a government takes control of them. There’s even Brain Police involved, what can be more dystopian than this?

This is a true story that pulls you into a strange, painful reality. What is it like to be the father of one of America’s most notorious serial killers? Jeffrey Dahmer murdered 17 males. He lured them to his home, gave his victims drugs and alcohol, and strangled them to death. After he killed, Dahmer had sex with the corpses, dismembered them, and threw the remains away. Sometimes he kept souvenirs, skulls, or took photos. This gruesome story by Jeffrey’s father, Lionel, exposes Dad’s shock as he unravels the truth. It talks about the horror, grief, desperation, and struggle to embrace the reality of the child he still loves. Would you be able to forgive if it was your child?

Every so often, a masterpiece tumbles out of someone who has never written anything before and thinks they can’t write. Katinka Newman clearly didn’t stop to think whether she should include this trivial detail or leave in what she had just written about that person – the result is a book that hangs together perfectly. You know this is exactly what happened. You witness the extraordinary downward spiral of someone getting supposedly the best mental healthcare there is. What you don’t expect is how she escapes from near-certain death. Newman doesn’t quote any antipsychiatry people telling us how bad psychiatry is but her account of what happened to her is all the more devastating for sticking just to her story.

Every once in a while, when I’m under a lot of stress or experiencing emotional turmoil, I struggle to sleep. At one point a few years back. I went more than a week where I was only able to sleep around an hour or two per night. Needless to say, I was not myself. I love how this story explores the importance of sleep, the long-term effects of not getting a solid amount of it, and what it’s like to lose large chunks of time that you can’t account for. Plus, stalking. There’s a lot of fascinating psychology in this story, along with a best friend whose sense of humor brings valuable comic relief to the situation. Yeah. Another must-read!

As someone who campaigns for a better way to operate spaceship Earth, Dispelling Wetiko was the precise slap in the face I needed to break free from the spell that has captured so many would-be change-makers like myself. It’s so easy to look around and point the finger at those who benefit most from the world’s problems as being the cause agents when nothing could be further from the truth. 

It is our collective hopes, our weaknesses, and our fears – multiplied in their billions – that create the super-structure that billionaires enjoy. Levy defines this as a collective psychosis of humanity that wreaks havoc on the world around us – a psychosis that we must face down before we can hope to defeat it.

This book unleashed my interest in gothic literature, and soon after, I wrote my book.

I enjoy the way the narrative begins innocently and picks up momentum. Racing to the ending like a runaway train. I did something similar in my book with the pacing. Stetson's novella feels so much more prominent in scope than a novella. What makes this gothic is that it captures the deterioration of a woman into madness, in much the same way Edgar Allen Poe did with his male protagonist in The Raven.

You can read Stetson's novella for free. It's in the public domain. 

Veronica is a professor of psychiatry with a special interest in psychosis such as schizophrenia and especially those that are seen in women after childbirth. These states of altered consciousness and the memories they produce give us insights into the nature of mental illness and the making of memories. The book develops as a series of case studies that are gently described in relation to the different brain regions that are involved in the experiences with a simple-to-understand diagram. Bringing together her clinical insights with beautiful perspectives from prose and poetry as well as from philosophers especially Henri Bergson, she makes a compelling case for memories being the core of what we as humans are.

The quality and production of this phenomenal hardcover of imposing size are mesmeric. Its metaphoric text on mental illness and accompanying artwork are visually appealing and poignantly immersive. Transformative text transports the reader, any reader—child, young adult, adult—to beauty and hurt, evolution and transformation. The perfect book for anyone living with psychosis or other illness, and for everyone else to understand the fragility of debilitating conditions.