Paul Gionfriddo's son Tim is one of the "6 percent"—an American with serious mental illness. He is also one of the half million homeless people with serious mental illnesses in desperate need of help yet underserved or ignored by our health and social-service systems. In this moving, detailed, clear-eyed exposé, Gionfriddo describes how Tim and others like him come to live on the street. Gionfriddo takes stock of the numerous injustices that kept his son from realizing his potential from the time Tim first began to show symptoms of schizophrenia to the inadequate educational supports he received growing up, his isolation from family and friends, and his frequent encounters with the juvenile justice system and, later, the adult criminal-justice system and its substandard mental health care. Tim entered adulthood with limited formal education, few work skills, and a chronic, debilitating disease that took him from the streets to jails to hospitals and then back to the streets. Losing Tim shows that people with mental illness become homeless as a result not of bad choices but of bad policy. As a former state policy maker, Gionfriddo concludes with recommendations for reforming America's ailing approach to mental health.

"Five Lost Years" is the personal account of a young woman afflicted with schizophrenia--an insightful autobiographical narrative by one who has experienced the disorder firsthand.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • ONE OF GQ's TOP 50 BOOKS OF LITERARY JOURNALISM IN THE 21st CENTURY • The heartrending story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease. "Reads like a medical detective journey and sheds light on a topic so many of us face: mental illness." —Oprah Winfrey Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins--aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony--and they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the ten Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen to one family? What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health. Their story offers a shadow history of the science of schizophrenia, from the era of institutionalization, lobotomy, and the schizophrenogenic mother to the search for genetic markers for the disease, always amid profound disagreements about the nature of the illness itself. And unbeknownst to the Galvins, samples of their DNA informed decades of genetic research that continues today, offering paths to treatment, prediction, and even eradication of the disease for future generations. With clarity and compassion, bestselling and award-winning author Robert Kolker uncovers one family's unforgettable legacy of suffering, love, and hope.

Lost in Schizophrenia is a memoir of a young man’s battle with schizophrenia. From his initial experiences with the condition to his lessons on living a normal life, Van Bennett candidly chronicles the truly unbelievable existence of a modern-day schizophrenic living in America.

A powerful work of non-fiction and the natural sequel to his Costa Book of the Year Award-winning The Shock of the Fall.

In the tradition of My Stroke of Insight and Brain on Fire, this powerful memoir recounts Barbara Lipska's deadly brain cancer and explains its unforgettable lessons about the brain and mind. Neuroscientist Lipska was diagnosed early in 2015 with metastatic melanoma in her brain's frontal lobe. As the cancer progressed and was treated, she experienced behavioral and cognitive symptoms connected to a range of mental disorders, including dementia and her professional specialty, schizophrenia. Lipska's family and associates were alarmed by the changes in her behavior, which she failed to acknowledge herself. Gradually, after a course of immunotherapy, Lipska returned to normal functioning, amazingly recalled her experience, and through her knowledge of neuroscience identified the ways in which her brain changed during treatment. Lipska admits her condition was unusual; after recovery she was able to return to her research and resume her athletic training and compete in a triathalon. Most patients with similar brain cancers rarely survive to describe their ordeal. Lipska's memoir, coauthored with journalist Elaine McArdle, shows that strength and courage but also an encouraging support network are vital to recovery.

A compelling and incisive book that questions the overuse of mental health terms to describe universal human emotions Public awareness of mental illness has been transformed in recent years, but our understanding of how to define it has yet to catch up. Too often, psychiatric disorders are confused with the inherent stresses and challenges of human experience. A narrative has taken hold that a mental health crisis has been building among young people. In this profoundly sensitive and constructive book, psychologist Lucy Foulkes argues that the crisis is one of ignorance as much as illness. Have we raised a 'snowflake' generation? Or are today's young people subjected to greater stress, exacerbated by social media, than ever before? Foulkes shows that both perspectives are useful but limited. The real question in need of answering is: how should we distinguish between 'normal' suffering and actual illness? Drawing on her extensive knowledge of the scientific and clinical literature, Foulkes explains what is known about mental health problems—how they arise, why they so often appear during adolescence, the various tools we have to cope with them—but also what remains unclear: distinguishing between normality and disorder is essential if we are to provide the appropriate help, but no clear line between the two exists in nature. Providing necessary clarity and nuance, Losing Our Minds argues that the widespread misunderstanding of this aspect of mental illness might be contributing to its apparent prevalence.

In Loss of Self in Psychosis: Psychological Theory and Practice Simon Jakes takes a critical look at contemorary approaches to the psychology of psychosis. In doing so, he explores how these vastly different approaches, as well as our numerous conceptualisations of schizophrenia, work to reduce the effectiveness of CBT as a treatment. Four different psychological approaches to psychosis are examined in the first part of this book, as well as the development of CBT for psychosis and the theory behind this. In the second part, he describes the therapy of some clients and suggests that incorporating ideas from some of the different theories of psychosis in the same treatment may be beneficial. Using extended examples from clinical practice over the past 20 years to illuminate his theories, Loss of Self in Psychosis: Psychological Theory and Practice will prove to be thought-provoking reading for clinical psychologists, psychiatrists and other mental health professionals working with this client group.