My literary interest began in childhood when my love for rhyme encouraged me to write limericks and poems. In 2009, my first novel, An Ordinary Life was published, which I considered to be a therapeutic exercise to see where it would lead, and here I am, much wiser, but still learning. Becoming an author has greatly enhanced my appreciation of the written word and how powerful it can be, hence, my book choices – a personal literary journey.
This book inspired me as an author and how to write with conviction.
The mental health element of the story was totally relatable, being a former worker in such a setting. I understood the hostility surrounding schizophrenia and the thoughts and feelings of the main character, a young boy who had the condition.
Skewed thinking and phobias can be isolating, where the sufferer can feel truly alone and this is the overwhelming sense throughout.
'A darkly quirky story of love, obsession and fear . . . a beautiful story hung around the enchanting and heartbreaking voice of teenager Greg' Anna James
Miss Hayes has a new theory. She thinks my condition's caused by some traumatic incident from my past I keep deep-rooted in my mind. As soon as I come clean I'll flood out all these tears and it'll all be ok and I won't be scared of Them anymore.
The truth is I can't think of any single traumatic childhood incident to tell her. I mean, there are plenty of bad…
Psychiatric genetics is now entering its second century. Lifetimes of work, billions of dollars spent, and not a single finding that has benefitted a single patient anywhere in the world.
Moreover, these labors are a preposterous distraction from addressing the real causes of those complaints that fall under the diagnostic rubric of “mental illness” – abuse, trauma, loss, and so forth. It’s time to move on.
Schizophrenia is a widely investigated psychiatric condition, and though there have been claims of gene "associations," decades of molecular genetic studies have failed to produce confirmed causative genes. In this book, Joseph focuses on the methodological shortcomings of schizophrenia genetic research.
His findings have major implications not only on how we understand the causes of schizophrenia and other psychiatric conditions, but also on how we understand the causes of human behavior in general. Chapters explore the differing theoretical concepts of schizophrenia, molecular genetic research around schizophrenia, family, twin, and adoption studies, and non-medical prevention and intervention strategies. Prominent researchers and…
I’ve always been fascinated by the brain, which, despite all our medical advances, remains a mysterious black box of humbling power and complexity. When I started researching prosopagnosia (face blindness) for Remember Me, I was surprised to find it’s a much-underdiagnosed condition. Those born with it often don’t realise “it’s a thing” until later in life, when the diagnosis explains many difficulties they encounter in daily life. My main character Sarah develops social anxiety as a result yet many people develop coping techniques and live full professional and personal lives. I currently live in Mauritius with my author husband, Adam Hamdy, and our three children.
This isn’t a crime book but it does involve an unravelling of a mystery. The story spans three timelines, childhood recollections of a tragic accident, in which the main character Matt’s brother dies, the aftermath of the incident and then the present day, in which Matt is being treated for schizophrenia in a mental hospital. Too often those suffering with schizophrenia get a hackneyed handling by creatives but author Nathan Flier, a former mental health nurse, paints vivid and insightful observations into this poorly misunderstood condition.
WINNER OF THE SPECSAVERS POPULAR FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR 2014
WINNER OF THE BETTY TRASK PRIZE 2014
'I'll tell you what happened because it will be a good way to introduce my brother. His name's Simon. I think you're going to like him. I really do. But in a couple of pages he'll be dead. And he was never the same after that.'
There are books you can't stop reading, which keep you up all night.
There are books which let us into the hidden parts of life and make…
It’s often said that humor can’t be translated. I’m a translator of more than thirty books, and I know that’s wrong! However, publishers rarely consider funny books for translation. I’ve made this list to point out to you all that sometruly great books that are really funny have broken through the wall protecting English-language readers from the wit and humor of the rest of the world. I’m also a literature professor, and I’m keen to get people to understand that literature does not have to be boring. If Charles Dickens, Evelyn Waugh, Kurt Vonnegut, or David Sedaris make you laugh, then so will Voltaire, Pekic, Hašek, Voinovich, and Gary!
Irresistible! Romain Gary had hoodwinked the literary world by publishing prize-winning successful novels under the false identity of Émile Ajar and was paranoid about being found out. So he wrote a confession by “Émile Ajar” to show that he hatedRomain Gary (“Uncle Bogey” in this novel) and was borderline crazy as well. Written in contorted, loopy, and killingly funny bad French, it was a challenge to get into English—but I just loved doing it! What’s more, the deception worked: nobody dared accuse Gary of being Ajar ever again. An unclassifiable masterpiece of simulated mental breakdown; a language game of an extravagant and rarefied kind.
By the early 1970s, Romain Gary had established himself as one of France's most popular and prolific novelists, journalists, and memoirists. Feeling that he had been typecast as "Romain Gary," however, he wrote his next novel under the pseudonym Emile Ajar. His second novel written as Ajar, Life Before Us, was an instant runaway success, winning the Prix Goncourt and becoming the best-selling French novel of the twentieth century.
The Prix Goncourt made people all the keener to identify the real "Emile Ajar," and stressed by the furor he had created, Gary fled to Geneva. There, Pseudo, a hoax confession…
I love historical fiction because it brings history and people from the past to life, showing us their struggles and their secrets—especially the women! Since my first historical novel, The Miracles of Prato, I've been paying attention to the women whose stories haven't been told. When I realized Hester Prynne is our first American historical feminist heroine—indeed, our American Eve and our original badass single mom—I knew I had to let her tell her story.
This new and acclaimed book about the first witch trial in America in 1651 Springfield, Massachusetts, reads like a novel in which two outsiders, Hugh Parsons and his vision-seeing wife Mary (who probably suffered from paranoid schizophrenia or post-partum psychosis) become the target of an entire town. Puritan laws and Old World medieval folk tales contribute to the sense of darkness and foreboding that prevail over the town and its inhabitants, reminding us that New England was a dark land, isolated and full of enemies, hungry and poor and primed to be swept up by diabolical accusations and actions. Read this for a deep understanding of the causes and consequences of the American witch trials.
*A TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES AND BBC HISTORY HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021*
'The best and most enjoyable kind of history writing' Hilary Mantel
'A bona fide historical classic' Sunday Times
Simply one of the best history books I have ever read' BBC History
In the frontier town of Springfield in 1651, peculiar things begin to happen. Precious food spoils, livestock ails and property vanishes. People suffer fits and are plagued by strange visions and dreams. Children sicken and die. As tensions rise, rumours spread of witches and heretics, and the community becomes tangled in a web of spite, distrust…
The Toronto novelist Martha Baillie has written about her family before –
in the guise of fiction, that is.
Now, in a memoir, she strips away the
fictional covering and lays her family bare: her artistic, sometimes remote
mother; her tender-hearted, professorial father; and her brilliantly gifted
sister, Christina, who battled mental illness for decades before taking her own
life in the family home in 2019.
Baillie faces up to her own partial
responsibility for her sister’s death. But she does so in graceful, chiseled
prose, as elegant as it is unflinching.
There Is No Blue shows that
elegies, even when written from deep pain, can be profoundly life-affirming.
Martha Baillie's richly layered response to her mother's passing, her father's life, and her sister's suicide is an exploration of how the body, the rooms we inhabit, and our languages offer the psyche a home, if only for a time.
Three essays, three deaths. The first is the death of the author's mother, a protracted disappearance, leaving space for thoughtfulness and ritual: the washing of her body, the making of a death mask. The second considers the author's father, his remoteness, his charm, a lacuna at the centre of the…
Okay, this one is definitely not light reading (trigger warning for just about any type of abuse you can think of) but Girls and their Monsters was an amazingly well-written and researched book that covers so much about how mental illness has been treated in the US throughout the decades.
It follows the story of four sisters all eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia and brings you into their world through all the good and bad to the point that (even with the heavy topics) I managed to get this one back to the library within a few days of checking it out.
With my own experiences with mental health (though not schizophrenia), it really hit home. 110% of my top nonfiction of the year.
For readers of Hidden Valley Road and Patient H.M., an “intimate and compassionate portrait” (Grace M. Cho) of the Genain quadruplets, the harrowing violence they experienced, and its psychological and political consequences, from the author of The Unfit Heiress.
In 1954, researchers at the newly formed National Institute of Mental Health set out to study the genetics of schizophrenia. When they got word that four 24-year-old identical quadruplets in Lansing, Michigan, had all been diagnosed with the mental illness, they could hardly believe their ears. Here was incontrovertible proof of hereditary transmission and, thus, a chance to bring international fame…
As a degreed socio-linguist and international educator, my novel writing has been immersed in the human experience that began early on as a teen musician immersed naively in a non-mainstream world of creatives and cons, when the word 'counterculture' was perceived more as a renaissance than the drug-laden world of darker gatherings that it later came to be known as. Boulder Blues is a work of fiction drawn from both fantasy and personal exposure. From there I went on to teach in American alternative education and later at university with a focus on rhetoric and forensic writing. My draw to other cultures and their perspectives moved me to go on to teach internationally.
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.
“One of the best books about going crazy . . . required reading for those who want to understand insanity from the inside.”—The New York Times Book Review
Mark Vonnegut set out in search of Eden with his VW bug, his girlfriend, his dog, and his ideals. But genetic predisposition and “a whole lot of **** going down” made Mark Vonnegut crazy in a culture that told him “mental illness is a myth” and “schizophrenia is a sane response to an insane society.” Here he tells his story with the eyes that see from the inside out: a moving remembrance…
I have written four books of popular science, and edited a fifth collection of my favorite science writers. I have been a judge for the 2022 Science in Society Book Awards for the National Association of Science Writers. I taught popular science writing for 34 years to undergraduates and graduates alike. Most of all, I love the wonder and awe of understanding the world around us.
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.
**Also an Academy Award–winning film starring Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly—directed by Ron Howard**
The powerful, dramatic biography of math genius John Nash, who overcame serious mental illness and schizophrenia to win the Nobel Prize.
“How could you, a mathematician, believe that extraterrestrials were sending you messages?” the visitor from Harvard asked the West Virginian with the movie-star looks and Olympian manner. “Because the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way my mathematical ideas did,” came the answer. “So I took them seriously.”
Thus begins the true story of John Nash, the mathematical genius who…
I am a practicing clinical psychologist, often at odds with the mainstream of my mental health profession. I have a strong interest in how society, culture, politics, philosophy, and psychology intersect, and my previous books about depression, activism, and anti-authoritarianism reflect that. The late historian Howard Zinn described me this way: “It is always refreshing to find someone who stands at the edge of his profession and dissects its failures with a critical eye, refusing to be deceived by its pretensions. Bruce Levine condemns the cold, technological approach to mental health and, to our benefit, looks for deeper solutions.”
“What does it mean to be called crazy in a crazy world?” asks Will Hall, the host of Madness Radio. Hall is one of the most gifted media hosts whom I have ever been interviewed by, as he is especially talented in drawing out his subjects. Hall is unique in that he is also a therapist who was once diagnosed with schizophrenia. Outside Mental Health is a collection of his interviews with more than 60 scientists, journalists, doctors, activist ex-psychiatric patients, and artists who provide alternative visions to psychiatry’s medical model—a paradigm that has been nonproductive and counterproductive for many people.
Outside Mental Health: Voices and Visions of Madness reveals the human side of mental illness. In this remarkable collection of interviews and essays, therapist, Madness Radio host, and schizophrenia survivor Will Hall asks, "What does it mean to be called crazy in a crazy world?" More than 60 voices of psychiatric patients, scientists, journalists, doctors, activists, and artists create a vital new conversation about empowering the human spirit by transforming society. "This book is required reading for anyone who cares deeply about mental health and its discontents." -Jonathan Metzl, MD, author of The Protest Psychosis: Schizophrenia and Black Politics "Bold,…
