This book demonstrates what happens to a diagnoses schizophrenic when she stops taking psychiatric drugs. Her amazing clarity, thirst for knowledge, exuberance, ability to make desicions will amaze you. Contrast what hppens to her when she returns to the group home and is swept back into their traditional drug maintenance. Readers can make their own judgment as to how our current tradition of administering psychiatric drug cocktails to these residents is serving our people (25%% of them) or destroying their lives needlessly in a consortium between drugcompanies, psychiatrists, and the government. No wonder schizophrenia runs 1%% of world populatin, but in the US it affects 3%% of our population.

This is the diary of an adolescent girl diagnosed with mental illness. She seems obsessed with celebrities such as Melissa Manchester, Styx, Madonna, Barbra Streisand, and affected by the book Carrie White by Stephen King. Her writing is based on sound associations, leading to rhymes, but sometimes incongruous, and in line with a perceptual disorder. So that a statement at the beginning of a sentence may be totally contradicted by its end. Her thoughtprocessing at times is like a train that switches tracks in the midst of a trajectory. Many times however it does make sense. It is hoped that this book may forge the way to innovative approaches to the treatment of thought disorders, which is a the basis of paranoid disorders, enlisting the strength of the affected individuall to ""put the train back on the correct track,"" and use more education and less drugs. Yael describes herself as a flying swan, therefore the cover.

After decades of the American “war on drugs” and relentless prison expansion, political officials are finally challenging mass incarceration. Many point to an apparently promising solution to reduce the prison population: addiction treatment. In Addicted to Rehab, Bard College sociologist Allison McKim gives an in-depth and innovative ethnographic account of two such rehab programs for women, one located in the criminal justice system and one located in the private healthcare system—two very different ways of defining and treating addiction. McKim’s book shows how addiction rehab reflects the race, class, and gender politics of the punitive turn. As a result, addiction has become a racialized category that has reorganized the link between punishment and welfare provision. While reformers hope that treatment will offer an alternative to punishment and help women, McKim argues that the framework of addiction further stigmatizes criminalized women and undermines our capacity to challenge gendered subordination. Her study ultimately reveals a two-tiered system, bifurcated by race and class.

"In Women Doing Life, Lora Bex Lempert examines the carceral experiences of women serving life sentences, presenting a typology of the ways that life-sentenced women grow and self-actualize, resist prison definitions, reflect on and own their criminal acts, and ultimately create meaningful lives behind prison walls. Looking beyond the explosive headlines that often characterize these women as monsters, Lempert offers rare insight into this vulnerable, little studied population. Her gendered analysis considers the ways that women do crime differently than men and how they have qualitatively different experiences of imprisonment than their male counterparts."--Provided by publisher.

This book is about the story of Desiree Chase and based on a true story, which takes place in Harlem, New York. Desiree is the eldest of three children, born to her parents during the mid-1950s. The book makes reference to the various trials and tribulations that Desiree had to encounter during her lifetime. From her mother and father's divorce, loosing both of them, her father while she was in her 20's then her mother later in life. To raising her children in a Christian home while dealing with alcoholism and abuse, which was the relationship between her and her husband and surviving that conflict with great spiritual courage and determination. Even though Desiree understood that no human being was perfect, including herself, she still considered herself a woman that was, just as all of us, created in the image of the true and living God. With that in mind, she decided to pick herself up after her divorce, continued to care for her children and then her granddaughter and worked two jobs both full time to do so. She also decided to return to college to receive what she needed to soar high in the employment world and in her own world. She also experienced more disappointment both on the job and in her personal life when she realized that discrimination still existed during these days and times while being considered for promotion in an employment that she loved and enjoyed in the social services world, which is to be aimed at the improvement of the human condition of others, as well as their employees. This has occurred to Desiree twice which was a definite discouragement and extremely depressing to the point that she felt that she needed to enter professional therapy for help and to maintain her own sanity. It is amazing what happens when she stands up for her own rights, her dignity and her beliefs and not fall for just anything. Desiree had to come to learn that even though she was at a very low point in her life at various times, someone was standing behind her holding her up and had her back the entire time, when thought there was no one there.

In A Tale of Two Cookies, a cozy mystery from Eve Calder, it’s nothing but sugar and spice at The Cookie House, but elsewhere on Coral Cay everything isn’t so nice. Pastry chef Kate McGuire is loving life on the laid-back island of Coral Cay, Florida. As junior partner in a bakery renowned for luscious desserts—especially her cookies—life is pretty sweet. So when an old friend arrives and announces a spur-of-the-moment beach wedding, that’s just the icing on the wedding cake. But the groom vanishes right as a television crew descends on the town to film a hot, new realty show. Is there a connection? Is her friend Desiree somehow involved? Or did groom Judson simply get cold feet? The bride and groom were paired better than warm cookies and cold milk, so Kate doesn’t buy it. As the show’s cast runs amok on the island and the investigation into Judson’s disappearance heats up, Kate and her pal Maxi, along with town dog Oliver, will brave the rambunctious world of reality TV and a wedding weekend gone awry, in an all-out effort to find the missing groom.