On March 26, 2018, rescue workers discovered a crumpled SUV and the bodies of two women and several children at the bottom of a cliff beside the Pacific Coast Highway. Investigators soon concluded that the crash was a murder-suicide, but there was more to the story: Jennifer and Sarah Hart, it turned out, were a white married couple who had adopted the six Black children from two different Texas families in 2006 and 2008. Behind the family's loving facade, however, was a pattern of abuse and neglect that went ignored.

When Jade Kelly met her new foster mother, she thought her prayers had been answered. Kindly Carol Docherty was everything her violent, drug-addicted mother was not. Loving and nurturing, she fed and clothed 10-year-old Jade and offered a life free of fear from near constant abuse. Or so Jade thought. As soon as social workers in Lancashire stopped their regular checks on Jade’s progress, Carol turned. Over the next six years Jade and three other girls were effectively kept prisoner in a bedroom she called the ‘bad room’ and subjected to unrelenting physical and mental abuse.

For years, Eddie Lee Sexton ruled his large family like Charles Manson. The depraved patriarch dominated his ragged brood of twelve children mentally, physically, and sexually, and enforced every cruelty imaginable, from vicious beatings to raping his daughters and fathering their children. Finally, in 1992, Sexton's eighteen-year-old daughter Machelle, seeking refuge in a women's shelter, revealed the shocking, sordid details of her father's abuse to authorities. As the law attempted to catch up to Eddie Lee Sexton, he moved his family to a mobile home in western Florida.

In September of 1990, in the Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights, sixteen-year-old Lisa Pruett was on her way to a midnight tryst with her boyfriend when she was viciously stabbed to death only thirty feet from the boy's home. The murder cast a palpable gloom over the upscale community and sparked accusations, theories, and rumors among Lisa's friends and peers. With a fresh perspective and painstaking research, James Renner reconstructs the events leading up to and following that heartbreaking night. What emerges is a portrait of a community seething with dark undercurrents.

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 to their fledgling institution.

If you thought you knew the story of The Teacher's Pet, get ready to be shocked. Hedley Thomas takes you behind the scenes with a blow-by-blow account of one of the most intriguing and enduring murder mysteries of our time - the crime, the podcast investigation, the sexual exploitation of teenage students, the courtroom drama - and how justice was finally delivered.

Malcolm Macarthur was a well-known Dublin socialite. Suave and urbane, he passed his days mingling with artists and aristocrats, reading philosophy, living a life of the mind. But by 1982, his inheritance had dwindled to almost nothing, a desperate threat to his lifestyle. Macarthur hastily conceived a plan: He would commit bank robbery, of the kind that had become frightfully common in Dublin at the time. But his plan spun swiftly out of control, and he needlessly killed two innocent civilians.

In 1911 two British heiresses, Claire and Dora Williamson, read a brochure about a revolutionary fasting treatment that promised a lifetime of good health. The sanatorium in the village of Olalla, west of Seattle, was surrounded by a beautiful forest, sparkling waters and fresh air. The sisters agreed it sounded perfect and exactly the restorative holiday they needed. But within a month of arriving, under the supervision of Doctor Linda Burfield Hazzard, Claire and Dora began to realise the frightening truth – they were not patients but prisoners at the isolated sanitorium.

By the time he was brought to trial in 1992, Soviet serial killer Andrei Chikatilo had killed more than fifty women and children, often sexually abusing them and leaving their bodies mutilated beyond recognition. Although he was initially arrested in 1984, the police lacked enough evidence to pin the unsolved murders on him and he was able to torture and kill dozens more before his eventual conviction.

Damian is just seven when he is taken in by foster carer Cathy Glass. His mother, Rachel, loves her three young children dearly, but she is vulnerable, naïve and unable to cope on her own. Cathy sets about helping Damian overcome his eating issues, with the hope that he will eventually return home. But when Rachel’s new boyfriend, Troy, arrives on the scene, Cathy becomes deeply concerned. She soon realises that Damian and his siblings are in great danger.

Echoing among the Blue Ridge Mountains were the cries of newborn babies that disappeared into the night. The screams of children nearly drowned out by the sound of crickets. A girl, hidden and waiting to be found, terrified, and confused. The fireflies sparkling in the woods, bringing light to darkled places.

Growing up in the 1960s in the suburbs of Chicago, Meg Kissinger’s family seemed to live a charmed life. With eight kids and two loving parents, the Kissingers radiated a warm, boisterous energy. Whether they were spending summer days on the shores of Lake Michigan, barreling down the ski slopes, or navigating the trials of their Catholic school, the Kissingers always knew how to live large and play hard. But behind closed doors, a harsher reality was unfolding.

The Roaring Twenties—the Jazz Age—has been characterized as a time of Gatsby frivolity. But it was also the height of the uniquely American hate group, the Ku Klux Klan. Their domain was not the old Confederacy, but the Heartland and the West. They hated Blacks, Jews, Catholics and immigrants in equal measure, and took radical steps to keep these people from the American promise. And the man who set in motion their takeover of great swaths of America was a charismatic charlatan named D.C. Stephenson.

Best friends Daryl Barber and James Boucher were responsible, and their parents trusted them to spend Spring Break at Daytona Beach unchaperoned. When the boys missed their agreed-upon daily check-ins, their parents were disappointed. When they failed to come home on their planned return date, their parents were terrified. They could not have known that their innocent sons would encounter two violent men on the Florida coast. They could not have imagined the torture their children would endure before their bodies turned up four months later in a Florida swamp.

When six-week-old Jasmine is placed in her care, foster mother Maggie Hartley is delighted to have a baby in the house again. Maggie's been given temporary custody of Jasmine after social services were concerned that the baby was failing to thrive and develop. With Maggie's love and care, Jasmine soon flourishes into a healthy, happy baby - but it is clear that all is not quite as it seems with her mum, Hailey.

The Unspeakable Mind is the definitive guide for a trauma-burdened age. With profound empathy and meticulous research, Shaili Jain, MD - a practicing psychiatrist and PTSD specialist at one of America’s top VA hospitals, trauma scientist at the National Center for PTSD, and a Stanford professor - shines a long-overdue light on the PTSD epidemic affecting today’s fractured world.

When Kelsey Patel was struck by searing back pain in her 20s, she had no idea that repressed emotions could manifest as intense anxiety and physical pain. Her healing came from acknowledging the disharmony in her life, which led Patel to seek out the self-care techniques and practices that helped get her body, health, and emotions back into alignment: Reiki, Emotional Freedom Technique, yoga, and other practices.

A new edition of the 1988 classic text that exposed the extreme prevalence of rape in America, coining the term "acquaintance rape" and establishing the disturbing statistics on sexual assault that still hold just as true today - now featuring an original preface from Gloria Steinem, a new introduction by Salamishah Tillet, an updated afterword by Mary P. Koss, PhD, as well as an updated resources section.

After a seemingly uneventful pregnancy, Megan Nix’s second daughter, Anna, was born very small and profoundly deaf. Megan and her husband, Luke, learned that Anna could have lifelong delays due to an infection from a virus they had never heard of: cytomegalovirus, or CMV, which Megan had unwittingly contracted from her toddler during pregnancy.

A compassionate and captivating examination of evolving attitudes toward mental illness throughout history and the fight to end the stigma. For centuries, scientists and society cast moral judgments on anyone deemed mentally ill, confining many to asylums. In Nobody’s Normal, anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker chronicles the progress and setbacks in the struggle against mental-illness stigma - from the 18th century, through America’s major wars, and into today’s high-tech economy.

That Julie Yip-Williams survived infancy was a miracle. Then, at age 37, with two little girls at home, Julie was diagnosed with terminal metastatic colon cancer, and a different journey began. The Unwinding of the Miracle is the story of a vigorous life refracted through the prism of imminent death. When she was first diagnosed, Julie Yip-Williams sought clarity and guidance through the experience and, finding none, began to write her way through it - a chronicle that grew beyond her imagining.

This thought-provoking, wide-ranging collection brings together essays by 15 leading philosophers reflecting on what it means to live according to a philosophy of life. From Eastern philosophies (Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism) and classical Western philosophies (such as Aristotelianism and Stoicism), to the four major religions, as well as contemporary philosophies (such as existentialism and effective altruism), each contributor offers a lively, personal account of how they find meaning in the practice of their chosen philosophical tradition.

Have you ever thought that if only you could change something about the way you looked, your life would be better? But the truth is that even if you were to magically attain the “perfect” body right now, your problems wouldn’t be solved. Because body image issues are never just about the body. Body image issues are always about something deeper, and they always serve some kind of purpose.

When 81-year-old Jay Mendelsohn decides to enroll in the undergraduate Odyssey seminar his son teaches at Bard College, the two find themselves on an adventure as profoundly emotional as it is intellectual. For Jay, a retired research scientist who sees the world through a mathematician's unforgiving eyes, this return to the classroom is his "one last chance" to learn the great literature he'd neglected in his youth - and, even more, a final opportunity to more fully understand his son, a writer and classicist.

For centuries, doctors have struggled to define mental illness - how do you diagnose it, how do you treat it, how do you even know what it is? In search of an answer, in the 1970s a Stanford psychologist named David Rosenhan and seven other people - sane, normal, well-adjusted members of society - went undercover into asylums around America to test the legitimacy of psychiatry's labels. Rosenhan's watershed study broke open the field of psychiatry, closing down institutions and changing mental health diagnosis forever.

In November 1987, a young couple on an overnight trip to Seattle vanished without a trace. A week later, the bodies of Tanya Van Cuylenborg and her boyfriend Jay Cook were found in rural Washington. It was a brutal crime, and it was the perfect crime: With few clues and no witnesses, an international manhunt turned up empty, and the sensational case that shocked the Pacific Northwest gradually slipped from the headlines.

Suffering from PTSD and severe depression from past trauma, battling an addiction to overprescribed psychiatric medication, and at the rock bottom of his career, journalist Brad Wetzler had nowhere to go. So he set out on a journey to wander and hopefully find himself—and the world—again. Into the Soul of the World is Wetzler’s thrilling, impactful, and heartrending memoir of healing—physically, emotionally, and spiritually. An adventure journalist at heart, Wetzler mixes travelogue with empowering insights about his inner journey to better care for his own mental health.

There are so many ways to be Not Pregnant: You can be young, old, partnered, or unpartnered. Maybe you have endometriosis. Maybe you don’t have enough eggs or your partner doesn’t have enough sperm. Or maybe there’s nothing wrong except you’re Just. Not. Pregnant. Amy Klein has been there. Faced with fertility obstacles, she quickly became an expert. And she wrote about it all for the New York Times Motherlode blog in her Fertility Diary column. Now, Amy has written the book she wishes she’d had when she was trying to get pregnant.

Constantly striving to achieve one goal after another and investing more in our careers than in our actual lives have left many of us feeling overwhelmed, overworked, and disconnected from who we are. Take Sheri Riley. She rose to the top of her field and was miserable. Sure, she was successful, but she couldn't buy peace, and material possessions didn't bring her clarity. Now an empowerment speaker and life strategist, Sheri Riley shares the secret that helped her regain her sense of self and purpose.

Diana Helmuth, thirty-three, is skeptical of organized religion. She is also skeptical of disorganized religion. But, more than anything, she is tired of God being dead. So, she decides to try on the fastest-growing, self-directed faith in America: Witchcraft. The result is 366 days of observation, trial, error, wit, and back spasms. Witches today are often presented as confident and finished, proud and powerful. Diana is eager to join them. She wants to follow all the rules, memorize all the incantations, and read all the liturgy. But there’s one glaring problem.