How should we think about psychic pain, behavioral wreckage, and Normativity? This cross-disciplinary and highly contested field of study is crowded with good faith efforts by practitioners and theorists at defining problems and proposing solutions. This list includes a variety of frameworks for thinking about mental health, as well as first-hand accounts from extraordinary people willing and able to share their experiences of mental health crisis.
"Fernando Balius was a perfectly ordinary, if misunderstood, young adult—until he started hearing voices.
In Traces of Madness, Fernando describes what it feels like, both mentally and physically, to lose your grip on reality. His life spins out of…
"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…
"Mental health is a political issue, but we often discuss it as a personal one. How is the current mental health crisis connected to capitalism, racism and other social issues? In a different world, how might we transform the ways that we think…
"Born to Persian parents at the height of the Islamic Revolution and raised amid a vibrant, loving, and gossipy Iranian diaspora in the American heartland, Melody Moezzi was bound for a bipolar life. At 18, she began battling a severe physical…
"Is mental illness – or madness – at root an illness of the body, a disease of the mind or a sickness of the soul? This Way Madness Lies is a thought-provoking exploration of the history of madness and its treatment as seen through the lens of its…
"The Center Cannot Hold is the eloquent, moving story of Elyn’s life, from the first time that she heard voices speaking to her as a young teenager, to attempted suicides in college, through learning to live on her own as an adult in an often…
"Stigma is one of the major barriers to care for people with mental health and related disorders. Stigma includes negative beliefs about and hostile perceptions towards others, shame and self-stigma, discriminatory practices in hiring, promotion and…
"Since its debut in 1952, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has set down the “official” view on what constitutes mental illness. Homosexuality, for instance, was a mental illness until 1973.…
"Maria Bamford is a comedian’s comedian (an outsider among outsiders) and has forever fought to find a place to belong. From struggling with an eating disorder as a child of the 1980s, to navigating a career in the arts (and medical debt and…
"Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Dr. Bessel van…
"Donna Jackson Nakazawa shares stories from people who have recognized and overcome their adverse experiences, shows why some children are more immune to stress than others, and explains why women are at particular risk. “Groundbreaking” (Tara…
"When Michael Pollan set out to research how LSD and psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) are being used to provide relief to people suffering from difficult-to-treat conditions such as depression, addiction and anxiety, he did not…
Strategies and Stories From the Transformative Justice Movement
"Transformative justice seeks to solve the problem of violence at the grassroots level, without relying on punishment, incarceration, or policing. Community-based approaches to preventing crime and repairing its damage have existed for centuries.…
"No matter the sport, the message to girls and women is the same: Be aggressive, but not too aggressive. Win at all costs, but be polite while doing it. Get strong, but not too big. Female athletes have long been conditioned to perform under these…
"Over thirty years, doctors diagnosed Sarah Fay with six different mental illnesses—anorexia, major depressive disorder (MDD), anxiety disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and bipolar…
"An unflinching, rare account of living with severe mental illness that is also a bold commentary on how we misunderstand this often debilitating disease.
The Complications is an intimate portrait of what it’s like to live with schizoaffective…
"Michel Foucault examines the archeology of madness in the West from 1500 to 1800 – from the late Middle Ages, when insanity was still considered part of everyday life and fools and lunatics walked the streets freely, to the time when such people…
"Madness is something that frightens and fascinates us all. It is a word with which we are universally familiar, and a condition that haunts the human imagination. In this Very Short Introduction, Andrew Scull provides a provocative and entertaining…
"Neurodiversity is on the rise. Awareness and diagnoses have exploded in recent years, but we are still missing a wider understanding of how we got here and why. Beyond simplistic narratives of normativity and difference, this groundbreaking book…
