My Psychosis Story recounts a real life experience I had in my early twenties at the start of my career. Having never been aware of the illness, I went through a series of diagnoses, which included post-traumatic concussion and anxiety disorder. Following several traumatic psychotic episodes, I was diagnosed with psychosis. This resulted in me being sectioned under the Mental Health Act 1983 and spending a month in a psychiatric hospital. The book primarily narrates a series of psychotic episodes I had over a few months. It describes my hallucinations and delusions and events when I was detained under the Mental Health Act in a psychiatric hospital. While the book talks about my fears, it is ultimately a story of recovery and hope. In my darkest moment, I sought strength from the love and support of my family, which got me through the difficult experience. With illustrations and sketches inspired by my experience, the book also describes the experience from the point of view of my loved ones and the effect my illness had on them. Often, family and friends can be affected just as much as the person with the illness. The book also explains what psychosis is, from the point of view of doctors and mental health experts who share their expertise on mental health. It is written in the hope that it raises awareness not just of psychosis but also of mental illness as a whole, which affects many people in our society.

Early in her life, Sandra started to exhibit the symptons of paranoid schizophrenia which came as a surprise to her unsuspecting family. Her book chronicles her struggles, hospitalisations, encounters with professionals, return to school, eventual marriage and success as an artist, writer, and advocate.

#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.

An honest and inspiring memoir of a young women battling psychosis, depression and anxiety The story is of a women who experiences mental health brought on by stress. A candid and intimate retelling of her breakdown, and her memories and experiences of her times in a mental health facility. Read the journal of her inner thoughts while in the mental health facility and after. With medical intervention and the love and support of her family and fiancé, she finds a way to manage and live with mental illness. Learn the importance of self care and what you can do to help yourself or a loved one going through mental illness. The story is written with the hope that others might be able to relate to some of her experience and know that they are not alone. The stigma of mental illness needs to be broken and people need to start talking about how they really feel.

She's not a Brooke Shields or a Marie Osmond. She is just an average Mother. Author Angela Tompkins invites you to come along with her as she recounts her bizarre, scary and very real story about the events that preceded her hospitalization and two-week "vacation" in a psych ward for postpartum psychosis-and the afterwards as she worked to assume her role as Mother again. Angela offers you a look inside of the head of a woman that took a run through the streets of insanity after the birth of her second child.

The new edition of this popular handbook has been thoroughly updated to include the latest data concerning treatment of first-episode patients. Drawing from their experience, the authors discuss the presentation and assessment of the first psychotic episode and review the appropriate use of antipsychotic agents and psychosocial approaches in effective management. This is an authoritative text written by a team of highly respected authors for psychiatrists, neurologists, primary care practitioners and health care professional working in psychiatry. Drawing from their experience, the presentation and assessment of the first psychotic episode are discussed, details regarding antipsychotic drugs and their appropriate use are reviewed and psychosocial approaches are examined. The resulting book offers a concise and valuable guide to those wishing to review the latest proposals for the treatment of first-episode psychosis supported by up-to-date references, in a single publication.

In this powerful, sometimes harrowing, deeply felt story, Patrick Tracey journeys to Ireland to track the origin and solve the mystery of his Irish-American family's multigenerational struggle with schizophrenia. For most Irish Americans, a trip to Ireland is often an occasion to revisit their family's roots. But for Patrick Tracey, the lure of his ancestral home is a much more powerful need: part pilgrimage, part investigation to confront the genealogical mystery of schizophrenia–a disease that had claimed a great-great-great-grandmother, a grandmother, an uncle, and, most recently, two sisters. As long as Tracey could remember, schizophrenia ran on his mother's side, seldom spoken of outright but impossible to ignore. Devastated by the emotional toll the disease had already taken on his family, terrified of passing it on to any children he might have, and inspired by the recent discovery of the first genetic link to schizophrenia, Tracey followed his genealogical trail from Boston to Ireland's county Roscommon, home of his oldest-known schizophrenic ancestor. In a renovated camper, Tracey crossed the Emerald Isle to investigate the country that, until the 1960s, had the world's highest rate of institutionalization for mental illness, following clues and separating fact from fiction in the legendary relationship the Irish have had with madness. Tracey's path leads from fairy mounds and ancient caverns still shrouded in superstition to old pubs whose colorful inhabitants are a treasure trove of local lore. He visits the massive and grim asylum where his famine starved ancestors may have lived. And he interviews the Irish research team that first cracked the schizophrenic code to learn how much–and how little–we know about this often misunderstood disease. Filled with history, science, and lore, Stalking Irish Madness is an unforgettable chronicle of one man's attempt to make sense of his family's past and to find hope for the future of schizophrenic patients. From the Hardcover edition.