mental health

Presents a personal memoir of the author's determination to understand adolescent depression and bipolar disorder in order to effectively help his own children overcome their own struggles with mental illness.

The author recalls her experiences growing up with a schizophrenic mother in the 1970s, discussing the nearly four years she and her sister spent in a cottage with their mother who believed she had been ordered to outfit the house as a field hospital in a secret war, and sharing her experiences as an adult trying to reconstruct the course of her mother's illness.

A memoir in which Elizabeth Cohen shares the story of her experiences as a suddenly single career mother who found herself in the position of caring for both her child, and her aging father.

Timothy Denevi's memoir of growing up as a hyperactive child diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) intertwined with his even-handed and thorough reporting on the history of the diagnosis and its treatment. Simultaneously, the author traces our understanding of the origins of ADHD, from the late 19th and early 20th centuries when hyperactivity was atributed to defective moral conscience, demons, or head trauma, through the twentieth century when food additives, bad parenting, and even government conspiracies were blamed, to the most recent genetic research.

Kristine Barnett's son, Jake, has an incredibly high IQ. He's working on an original theory in astrophysics that may someday put him in line for a Nobel prize. Jake's story is remarkable not just because of his achievements but because he was diagnosed with Autism at age two. Against the experts' advice, Kristine pulled her son out of special education classes and began preparing him for mainstream kindergarten on her own. She focused on what he could do, not on what he couldn't, and the results were transformative.

The author recounts his lifelong battle with anxiety, showing the many manifestations of the disorder as well as the countless treatments that have been developed to counteract it, and provides a history of the efforts to understand this common form of mental illness.

"Just twenty-two years old, Su Meck was already married and the mother of two children in 1988 when a ceiling fan in the kitchen of her home fell from its mounting and struck her in the head. She survived the life-threatening swelling in her brain that resulted from the accident, but when she regained consciousness in the hospital the next day, she didn't know her own name"--Provided by publisher.