When putting together this list, I hoped to include a wide representation of races. But in 1997, when intoxication could no longer keep the pain at bay, he plunged into severe depression and became suicidal. A funny and tragic examination of her own severe depression, Lawson’s memoir makes light of mental illness without trivializing it. In this way the reader is able to viscerally experience the incredible speeding highs of mania and the crushing blows of depression, just as Cheney did. According to the American Psychiatric Association, minority youth with behavioral health issues are more likely to be referred to the juvenile justice system over specialty primary care when compared to white youth. Refusing to be ashamed or silenced, Moezzi became an outspoken advocate, determined to fight the stigma surrounding mental illness and reclaim her life along the way. In this remarkable and beautifully written work, Portia shines a bright light on a dark subject. Her famous memoir of her bouts with depression and skirmishes with drugs, Prozac Nation is a witty and sharp account of the psychopharmacology of an era for readers of Girl, Interrupted and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.” (Amazon). Talusan’s hard-hitting memoir is an exploration of her experiences with sexual abuse, racism, depression, and cancer. The lessons I have learned are not limited to race, gender, or sexual orientation. A powerful, funny, and moving narrative, Haldol and Hyacinths is a tribute to the healing power of hope and humor.” (Amazon). Charlamange hopes Shook One can be a call to action: Getting help is your right. Told with fierce clarity, humor, and urgent lyricism, The Man Who Couldn’t Stop is a haunting story of a personal nightmare that shines a light into the darkest corners of our minds.” (Amazon), “On the outside, Terri Cheney was a highly successful, attractive Beverly Hills entertainment lawyer. . 13 Memoirs About Mental Illness That Are Too Powerful to Miss. We see her fight between ambition and addiction and how, inevitably, her disease threatens everything she worked so hard to achieve. Darkly funny and intensely personal, Forney’s memoir provides a visceral glimpse into the effects of a mood disorder on an artist’s work, as she shares her own story through bold black-and-white images and evocative prose.” (Amazon), “True crime, memoir, and ghost story, Mean is the bold and hilarious tale of Myriam Gurba’s coming of age as a queer, mixed-race Chicana. After writing four novels, Fisher turner her writerly focus inward, adapting her successful one-woman stage show into a darkly funny and raw memoir about growing up as Hollywood royalty, landing the role of a lifetime at 19 years old and learning from failed relationships, all while struggling with alcoholism, drug addiction and mental health issues. He wasn’t alone. Days earlier, she had been on the threshold of a new, adult life: at the beginning of her first serious relationship and a promising career at a major New York newspaper. When you buy through these links, Book Riot may earn a commission. We see the world as Cree did―turned upside down, the richness of life muted and dulled, its pleasures perverted. Hunger is a deeply personal memoir from one of our finest writers, and tells a story that hasn’t yet been told but needs to be.” (Amazon). Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen Truth is a powerful tool. Lit is about getting drunk and getting sober, becoming a mother by letting go of a mother, learning to write by learning to live. She began an ordeal of hospitalizations, halfway houses, relapses, more suicide attempts, and constant, withering despair. In describing his book, he … Fourteen Insightful Memoirs about Mental Illness and Addiction 1. And Donald Hall lovingly remembers the “moody seesaw” of his relationship with his wife, Jane Kenyon.” (Amazon). “‘Despair is always described as dull,’ writes Daphne Merkin, ‘when the truth is that despair has a light all its own, a lunar glow, the color of mottled silver.’ This Close to Happy―Merkin’s rare, vividly personal account of what it feels like to suffer from clinical depression―captures this strange light. Sebastian’s memoir Please Save Me From Myself was released at the end of July 2014. The perspectives of his three children, his spouse, and his own distorted reality combine to offer readers a glimpse of a world that will either feel hauntingly familiar or mind-boggling. From her days as a thirteen-year-old Jesus freak through her eventual diagnosis of bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder, this spirited memoir chronicles Pershall’s journey through hell and her struggle with the mental health care system.” (Amazon), “David Adam―an editor at Nature and an accomplished science writer―has suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder for twenty years, and The Man Who Couldn’t Stop is his unflinchingly honest attempt to understand the condition and his experiences. In sharp and shocking language, Lights On, Rats Out brings us closely into these years. Kaysen’s memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. 37 / 38. By attempting to name secrets and lies he and his mother spent a lifetime avoiding, he asks us to confront the terrifying possibility that few in this nation actually know how to responsibly love, and even fewer want to live under the weight of actually becoming free.” (Amazon). The temptation to examine the human condition through characters who think or behave in ways we find strange is a common theme in literature, and yet more and more of society is waking up to the fact that frivolous depictions of mental illness can have serious real-world implications. “Writer Sandra Allen did not know their uncle Bob very well. So at the age of twelve, Burroughs found himself amidst Victorian squalor living with the doctor’s bizarre family, and befriending a pedophile who resided in the backyard shed. Undiagnosed for decades, Ikpi’s illness culminated in a breakdown that resulted in hospitalization. Then in 2009 Bob mailed Sandy his autobiography. Unlike any other memoir of depression, however, Unholy Ghost includes many voices and depicts the most complete portrait of the illness. In this stunning memoir, one woman brings us into her... 2. Mental illness is experienced by one in five Americans in any given year, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Losing Dad poignantly shows the effects of inadequate treatment for those living with a severe mental illness in America.” (Amazon), “Stacy Pershall grew up as an overly intelligent, depressed, deeply strange girl in Prairie Grove, Arkansas, population 1,000. Ironically, Charlamagne’s fear of failure—of falling into the life of stagnation or crime that caught up so many of his friends and family in his hometown of Moncks Corner—has been the fuel that has propelled him to success. It describes my struggles with mental health care. Larry McMurtry recounts the despair that descended after his quadruple bypass surgery. Mental is eye-opening and powerful, tackling an illness and drug that has touched millions of lives and yet remains shrouded in social stigma.” (Amazon). This beautifully written memoir is destined to become a classic in its genre.” (Amazon), “An intimate, moving book written with the immediacy and directness of one who still struggles with the effects of mental and chronic illness, The Collected Schizophrenias cuts right to the core. Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life. Being anxious doesn’t serve the same purpose anymore. From the Condé Nast building to seedy nightclubs, from doctors’ offices and mental hospitals, Marnell “treads a knife edge between glamorizing her own despair and rendering it with savage honesty.…with the skill of a pulp novelist” (The New York Times Book Review) what it is like to live in the wild, chaotic, often sinister world of a young female addict who can’t say no.” (Amazon). She discusses the illness in the context of her life, including her struggle to get pregnant, the high expectations she had for herself and that others placed on her as a new mom, and the role of her husband, friends, and family as she struggled to attain her maternal footing in the midst of a disabling depression.” (Amazon), “The former middle distance Olympic runner and high-end escort speaks out for the first time about her battle with mental illness, and how mania controlled and compelled her in competition, but also in life. Told using expressive artwork that invokes both laughter and tears, this moving and highly entertaining single volume depicts not only the artist’s burgeoning sexuality, but many other personal aspects of her life that will resonate with readers.” (Amazon), “The Noonday Demon examines depression in personal, cultural, and scientific terms. But that won't stop us, here at women.com, from seeking help, talking about our illnesses, or furthering our understanding of these complicated struggles. He confronts the challenge of defining the illness and describes the vast range of available medications and treatments, and the impact the malady has on various demographic populations—around the world and throughout history. Memoirs give us the unique ability to enter the mind and experiences of someone suffering from a mental illness, addiction, or disorder. She shares her battle with alcoholism and drug addiction, explaining how opioids … This is a tale of self-loathing, self-sabotage, and yes, self-tanner. Keep an eye on your inbox. This collection of essays follows Wang on her journey of being... Willow Weep for Me by Meri Nana-Ama Danquah. Now she was labeled violent, psychotic, a flight risk. Image Via Amazon “For as long as author Porochista Khakpour can remember, she has been sick. While hitting #1 on the Billboard charts was exhilarating, the group’s success soon became overwhelming. Descriptions graciously supplied from publisher descriptions and condensed when necessary. When her mood-stabilizing medications aren’t threatening her life, they’re shoving her from depression to mania and back in the space of an hour. “At seventeen Lori Schiller was the perfect child-the only daughter of an affluent, close-knit family. An original book about a life lived with books and suicidal depression. This should have the culmination of all her years of hard work – first as a child model in Australia, then as a cast member of one of the hottest shows on American television. Meri Danquah rises from the pages, a true survivor, departing a world of darkness and reclaiming her life.” (Goodreads). She was also a “doctor shopper” who manipulated Upper East Side psychiatrists for pills, pills, and more pills; a lonely bulimic who spent hundreds of dollars a week on binge foods; a promiscuous party girl who danced barefoot on banquets; a weepy and hallucination-prone insomniac who would take anything—anything—to sleep. As a woman who describes her own body as “wildly undisciplined,” Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. The stigma around mental illness can be crippling. An essay collection of undeniable power, The Collected Schizophrenias dispels misconceptions and provides insight into a condition long misunderstood.” (Amazon), “The Color of Hope: People of Color Mental Health Narratives is a project that sheds light on mental health in communities of color by sharing stories by those affected by mental illness. Schizophrenia is not a single unifying diagnosis, and Esmé Weijun Wang writes not just to her fellow members of the “collected schizophrenias” but to those who wish to understand it as well. With inspiring fearlessness, McClelland tackles perhaps her most harrowing assignment to date: investigating the damage in her own mind and repairing her broken psyche. edited by (Book Riot Editor) Kelly Jensen, The Color of Hope: People of Color Mental Health Narratives, Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression, Fast Girl: A Life Spent Running from Madness, This Fragile Life: A Mother’s Story of a Bipolar Son, Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So, Loud in the House of Myself: Memoir of a Strange Girl, The Man Who Couldn’t Stop: OCD and the True Story of a Life Lost in Thought, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, Not All Black Girls Know How to Eat: A Memoir of Bulimia, The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness, Shadows in the Sun: Healing from Depression and Finding the Light Within, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning with Depression, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness. “From the New York Times bestselling author and former beauty editor Cat Marnell, a “vivid, maddening, heartbreaking, very funny, chaotic” (The New York Times) memoir of prescription drug addiction and self-sabotage, set in the glamorous world of fashion magazines and downtown nightclubs. Revealing how even the most successful people can suffer from depression, DMC offers inspiration for everyone in pain—information and insight that he hopes can help save other lives.” (Amazon). McClelland discovers she is far from alone: while we frequently associate PTSD with wartime combat, it is more often caused by other manner of trauma and can even be contagious-close proximity to those afflicted can trigger its symptoms. Mailhot trusts the reader to understand that memory isn’t exact, but melded to imagination, pain, and what we can bring ourselves to accept. The only shameful thing about mental illness is the stigma attached to it. But when she attempted suicide and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, there were no flowers. “Shortly before her thirtieth birthday, Forney was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. In this riveting and intimate blend of science, history, and memoir, Adam explores the weird thoughts that exist within every mind and explains how they drive millions of us toward obsession and compulsion. Lights On, Rats Out describes a fiercely smart and independent woman’s charged attachment to a mental health professional and the dangerous compulsion to keep him in her life at all costs.” (Amazon), “Lit follows the self-professed blackbelt sinner, Mary Karr’s descent into the inferno of alcoholism and madness–and to her astonishing resurrection. In this searing, unflinchingly honest book, Portia de Rossi captures the complex emotional truth of what it is like when food, weight, and body image take priority over every other human impulse or action. Lacing Bob’s narrative with chapters providing greater contextualization, Sandy also shares background information about their family, the culturally explosive time and place of their uncle’s formative years, and the vitally important questions surrounding schizophrenia and mental healthcare in America more broadly. In essays that range from using fashion to present as high-functioning to the depths of a rare form of psychosis, and from the failures of the higher education system and the dangers of institutionalization to the complexity of compounding factors such as PTSD and Lyme disease, Wang’s analytical eye, honed as a former lab researcher at Stanford, allows her to balance research with personal narrative. At 18, she began battling a severe physical illness, and her community stepped up, filling her hospital rooms with roses, lilies and hyacinths. It begins at a posh New England prep school—and with a prescription for the Attention Deficit Disorder medication Ritalin. disturbed? Then Again by Diane Keaton. Flagrantly manic and terrified that medications would cause her to lose creativity, she began a years-long struggle to find mental stability while retaining her passions and creativity. There are only brief anecdotes of symptoms during childhood and adolescence. Styron is perhaps the first writer to convey the full terror of depression’s psychic landscape, as well as the illuminating path to recovery.”. “With candor and humor, a manic-depressive Iranian-American Muslim woman chronicles her experiences with both clinical and cultural bipolarity. Click here to buy. Finally, she can no longer deny that she will die if she doesn’t get help, overcome her shame, and conquer her addiction to using food as a weapon against herself.” (Amazon), “Elizabeth Wurtzel writes with her finger on the faint pulse of an overdiagnosed generation whose ruling icons are Kurt Cobain, Xanax, and pierced tongues. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder; Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. Built on the bones of fundamental identity questions as contorted by a distressed brain, My Body Is a Book of Rules pulls no punches in its self-deprecating and ferocious look at human fallibility.” (Amazon), “My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness is an honest and heartfelt look at one young woman’s exploration of her sexuality, mental well-being, and growing up in our modern age. “As a young college graduate a year into treatment with a psychiatrist, Cree LeFavour began to organize her days around the cruel, compulsive logic of self-harm: with each newly lit cigarette, the world would drop away as her focus narrowed on the blooming release of pleasure-pain as the burning tip was applied to an unblemished patch of skin. Mental Illness. Mental health memoirs offer an eye-opening look at the lives of the mentally ill and those around them. It wasn’t until I went to group therapy that I really understood the power of finding solidarity and understanding with other members of the mentally ill community. Diverse stories and representation are so important to our growth as a society. The clinical terms used to describe her illness were so inadequate that she chose to focus instead on her own experience, in her words, ‘on what bipolar disorder felt like inside my own body.’ Here the events unfold episodically, from mood to mood, the way she lived and remembers life. Girl Interrupted GIF - Find & Share on GIPHY Hospitalizations, calls in the night, alcohol and drug relapses, pleas for money, and continuous disputes, her son’s journey was long, arduous, and almost fatal. Mental illnesses are associated with distress and/or problems functioning in social, work or family activities. Keep an eye on your inbox. Thank you for signing up! 3. This literary memoir takes readers from her childhood in India where depression is thought to be a curse to life in America where she eventually finds the light within by drawing on both her rich Hindu heritage and Western medicine to find healing.” (Amazon). 7 Stunning Memoirs About Mental Illness 1. “Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman’s coming of age on the Seabird Island Band in the Pacific Northwest. She also researches the clinical aspects of bipolar disorder, including the strengths and limitations of various treatments and medications, and what studies tell us about the conundrum of attempting to “cure” an otherwise brilliant mind. Or, maybe they do, but if readers can’t find them, that representation still fails to exist. With uncommon humanity, candor, wit and erudition, award-winning author Solomon takes readers on a journey of incomparable range and resonance into the most pervasive of family secrets. In this personal account, she tells how she did it, taking us not only into her own shattered world, but drawing on the words of the doctors who treated her and family members who suffered with her.” (Amazon), “Running with Scissors is the true story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her unorthodox psychiatrist who bore a striking resemblance to Santa Claus. It is a brilliant evocation of a “parallel universe” set within the kaleidoscopically shifting landscape of the late sixties. Saks discusses frankly the paranoia, the inability to tell imaginary fears from real ones, the voices in her head telling her to kill herself (and to harm others), as well as the incredibly difficult obstacles she overcame to become a highly respected professional. “As one third of the legendary rap group Run D.M.C., Darryl ‘DMC’ McDaniels—aka Legendary MC, The Devastating Mic Controller, and the King of Rock—had it all: talent, money, fame, prestige. Danquah’s memoir is a revolutionary and insightful … Lori Schiller had entered the horrifying world of full-blown schizophrenia. This collection of essays follows Wang on her journey of being diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. “…Brain on Fire is the powerful account of one woman’s struggle to recapture her identity. Meri Danquah describes the challenges of racism and depression. Her body was a canvas of cruelty; each scar a mark of pride and shame. Written with Karr’s relentless honesty, unflinching self-scrutiny, and irreverent, lacerating humor, it is a truly electrifying story of how to grow up–as only Mary Karr can tell it.” (Amazon). But Bob had lived a hermetic life in a remote part of California for longer than Sandy had been alive, and what little Sandy knew of him came from rare family reunions or odd, infrequent phone calls. But as that burden decreases for some folks, the reality remains: people of color are still grossly underrepresented in discussions around mental illness. Rachel Pruchno's "Surrounded By Madness: A Memoir of Mental Illness and Family Secrets" is a must read. Memoirs of mental health and addiction can also fill in the gaps of knowledge that those on the outside need to relate to those struggling with mental illness and addiction. “In 1967, after a session with a... 3. At the late age of twenty-eight and after nineteen rejections, he is finally accepted to Harvard Medical School, where he gains purpose, a life, and some control over his condition. “New York Times bestselling author Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and bodies, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. Heavy is a ‘gorgeous, gutting…generous’ (The New York Times) memoir that combines personal stories with piercing intellect to reflect both on the strife of American society and on Laymon’s experiences with abuse. Catch the book trailer on YouTube.com. It addresses some of the biases and stigma associated with mental illness. An Unquiet Mind is a memoir of enormous candor, vividness, and wisdom—a deeply powerful book that has both transformed and saved lives.” (Amazon). A hair-raising stint in ‘The Mental Marriott,’ with an oddball tribe of gurus and saviors, awakens her to the possibility of joy and leads her to an unlikely faith. By sharing our stories, we open up discussion around the topic and break through stigma and shame. “Kiera Van Gelder’s first suicide attempt at the age of twelve marked the onset of her struggles with drug addiction, depression, post-traumatic stress, self-harm, and chaotic romantic relationships-all of which eventually led to doctors’ belated diagnosis of borderline personality disorder twenty years later. At 18, screenwriter and Bollywood actress Shaheen Bhatt was diagnosed with depression. Killer. For more memoirs about mental illness, check out our list of 50 Must-Read Memoirs About Mental Illness. With form unlike any other, she writes about her experiences with bipolar disorder and the medications that almost killed her. The triumphant result is Heart Berries, a memorial for Mailhot’s mother, a social worker and activist who had a thing for prisoners; a story of reconciliation with her father―an abusive drunk and a brilliant artist―who was murdered under mysterious circumstances; and an elegy on how difficult it is to love someone while dragging the long shadows of shame.