Schizophrenia Memoirs

Vince Granata remembers standing in front of his suburban home in Connecticut the day his mother and father returned from the hospital with his three new siblings in tow. He had just finished scrawling their names in orange chalk on the driveway: Christopher, Timothy, and Elizabeth. Twenty-three years later, Vince was a thousand miles away when he received the news that would change his life - his younger brother, Tim, propelled by unchecked schizophrenia, had killed their mother in their childhood home.

Professor of psychiatry Elyn R. Saks writes about her struggle with schizophrenia in this unflinching account of her mental illness. In The Center Cannot Hold, Saks draws readers into a nightmare world of medications, a misguided health-care system, and social stigmas. But she would not be defeated. With a strength and force of will that most can only imagine, Saks reclaimed her life and went on to achieve great success.

The Bahamas is a 700-island nation off the coast of Florida, home to 400,000 inhabitants. I grew up there and lived a charmed life: we had a mansion on an acre of land with 270-degree ocean views, a maid, a gardener and a boat. I went to the best school on the island of Nassau, was skippering sunfish boats from the age of 7 and had a happy circle of friends. But I also had early signs of a mood disorder. When the offshore banking crisis of the late 1980s pushed us out of our idyllic paradise, my family and I relocated to Florida, a move that exacerbated my mood disorder at the start of high...

In this memoir essay, we go into the experience of a schizophrenic. We start with beginning from when the psychosis began, give first-hand accounts of all that was experienced by the schizophrenic. We go into detail all the hallucinations experienced and take a trip into the two times the schizophrenic was in the psych ward. We give personal details of his life all the way up until the downhill ride of when he finally finds the right medication and becomes we know today as: A Survivor of Schizophrenia

Divided Minds is a dual memoir of identical twins, one of whom faces a life sentence of schizophrenia and the other who becomes a psychiatrist after entering the spotlight that had for so long been focused on her sister.

Enveloped in the dark inner kingdom of her schizophrenia, 16-year-old Deborah is haunted by private tormentors that isolate her from the outside world. With the reluctant and fearful consent of her parents, she enters a mental hospital where she will spend the next three years battling to regain her sanity with the help of a gifted psychiatrist. As Deborah struggles toward the possibility of the "normal" life she and her family hope for, the listener is inexorably drawn into her private suffering and deep determination to confront her demons.

While his wife and two-year-old daughter watched TV in the living room, David Poses was in the kitchen, measuring the distance from his index finger to his armpit. He needed to be sure he could pull the trigger with a shotgun barrel in his mouth. Twenty-six inches. Thirty-two years old. More than a decade in a double life fueled by depression and heroin.

On a highway in Houston, Texas, Sarah LaBrie’s mother was found screaming at passing cars, terrified she would be murdered by invisible assailants. The diagnosis of schizophrenia that followed compelled Sarah to rethink her childhood, marked at turns by violence and all-consuming closeness. Digging into the events that led to her mother’s break, Sarah traces her family history of mental illness, from the dysphoria that plagued her great-grandmother, a granddaughter of slaves, to her own experience with depression as a scholarship student at Brown.

In this book, the author details his personal insights into the inner workings of suffering with the onset of Schizophrenia: He describes his thoughts and fears with an uncanny outside perspective as he deals with many changes and challenges in his life circumstances. He experiences racing fearful thoughts that he tries his best to ignore and being paranoid not wanting to leave the house to go outside. Being a dependent in a strange small town, with very little financial resources, David sold most of his possessions and drained his life savings on his psychotic adventure. Having little ...

When journalist Steve Lopez sees Nathaniel Ayers playing his heart out on a two-string violin on Los Angeles' skid row, he finds it impossible to walk away. More than 30 years ago, Ayers was a promising classical bass student at Juilliard - ambitious, charming, and also one of the few African-Americans there - until he gradually lost his ability to function, overcome by schizophrenia.

Over time, the two men form a bond and Lopez imagines that he might be able to change Ayers' life. The Soloist is a beautifully told story of devotion in the face of seemingly unbeatable challenges.

Dr. Amador's research on poor insight was inspired by his success helping his brother Henry, who had schizophrenia, accept treatment. Like tens of millions of others diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and addictions, Henry did not believe he was ill. In this latest edition, all chapters have been updated with new research on anosognosia (lack of insight) and much more detail on LEAP. Listeners will find expanded guidance on how to learn and use LEAP.

Moving, harrowing, and ultimately uplifting, Lori Schiller's memoir is a classic testimony to the ravages of mental illness and the power of perseverance and courage. At 17, Lori Schiller was the perfect child - the only daughter of an affluent, close-knit family. Six years later she made her first suicide attempt, then wandered the streets of New York City dressed in ragged clothes, tormenting voices crying out in her mind. Lori Schiller had entered the horrifying world of full-blown schizophrenia.

When David LaChapelle begins attending Carleton University everything seems to be going in the right direction. But he begins experiencing unexplainable changes in his thought processes which eventually devolves into a full-blown psychotic state. He tries to get help but is turned down, told by the admitting physician that he is fine and not in need of psychiatric care. Not until his family steps in and takes him to the hospital does he come close to receiving any treatment. While there, however, he meets Angela, a fellow patient he will later learn is also suffering from schizophrenia. For...

In I'll Give You Something to Cry About, Elizabeth Acker gives a stunning account of growing up under the abusive control of an emotionally and mentally ill mother. Elizabeth is forced to become estranged from her father, and struggles alone to create hope and meaning for her life, while serving her mother like a slave. This audiobook is a true account of a daughter's struggle to survive a mother with paranoia, schizophrenia, and manic depression.

Mental illness can have devastating effects on a life. The author of this memoir details his life of diagnoses of autism, panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, bipolar disorder, and hypochondria. This is an account of what you may call an exceptional psychiatry case. The author takes you on a journey through his tumultuous childhood and into his troubled adulthood in this provocatively honest psychological autobiography.

Switching Time is the first story centering on multiple personality disorder to be told by the treating physician. It is the incredible saga of a young woman stranded in unimaginable darkness who, in order to survive, created 17 different versions of herself. One by one, Karen's "alters" began showing themselves: men, women, young boys, a toddler, black, white, vicious, nurturing, prim, licentious. And their "stepping out" confronted Baer with the challenge of a lifetime.

In the fall of 1994, Erich Baumeister (13), was playing in a wooded area of his family’s estate, when he stumbled across a partially buried human skeleton. He presented the disturbing finding to his mother, Julie, who inquired about the skull to her husband, Herb. He told her that the skeleton belonged to his late father, an anesthesiologist. Astonishingly, Julie believed him. In You Think You Know Me, best-selling author Ryan Green assumes the role of Herb Baumeister and attempts to fill in the blanks on one of Indiana’s most mysterious serial killers.

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 12 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. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the 10 Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic.

Following the death of her husband, Hilda Mahaney Tucker begins a lifelong battle with mental illness. Her son. only fifteen-years-old when he first witnesses the onset of his mother's paranoia, tells the story of her rollercoaster life of isolation, electroshock therapy and psychopharmacology, laced with periods of peace and tranquility.

John Forbes Nash, Jr., a prodigy and legend by the age of 30, dazzled the mathematical world by solving a series of deep problems deemed "impossible" by other mathematicians. But at the height of his fame, Nash suffered a catastrophic mental breakdown and began a harrowing descent into insanity, resigning his post at MIT, slipping into a series of bizarre delusions, and eventually becoming a dreamy, ghostlike figure at Princeton, scrawling numerological messages on blackboards.