Five Good Books about Mental Illness. As a parent and caregiver for an adult living with a serious psychiatric illness, I have read a lot about the subject. Here are my five favorite books about psychiatric illness.
An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1996) by Kay Redfield Jamison, PhD. The best memoir about living with a serious mental illness and the best book overall that I have read about mental illness, in this case bipolar disorder. Fine literature written by a brilliant author who earned a PhD in psychology and has been awarded about a dozen honorary doctorates. It is inspirational.
The Mad Among Us: A History of the Care of America’s Mentally Ill (1995) by Gerald Grob, PhD. The author was a medical historian who wrote this balanced and objective book about the history of psychiatry. It includes the good and the bad. Despite the unfortunate title, this is a great non-fiction book about the history of psychiatry in the USA.
We’ve Got Issues: Children and Parents in the Age of Medication (2010) by Judith Warner. This book, written by a journalist, was originally intended to be a critique of psychiatry and the parents of children with mental illnesses. But as the author met families and did her research, she changed her mind and wrote a balanced book about parents trying to help their children. As the author points out, we parents are not eager to put our children on psychiatric medications; in fact the opposite is true.
Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of An American Family (2020) by Robert Kolker. This biography was written by a journalist about the lives of a large family with twelve children, six of whom were eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia. It is intense and disturbing, as is living with schizophrenia. It is not an encouraging or feel-good book.
Innate: How the Wiring of Our Brains Shapes Who We Are (2018) by Kevin Mitchell, PhD. This book by a neuroscientist is more broadly about neuroscience, rather than specifically about mental illness. But the author addresses serious mental illness and the state of our knowledge about possible underlying causes of it as a developmental disorder. This book focuses on modern scientific evidence, rather than assumptions and the blame game often associated with attitudes about mental illnesses.
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