Showing results by publisher "Audible Studios" in Mental Health

In the early 1980s, Brian O'Dea was operating a $100 million a year, 120-man drug smuggling business, and had developed a terrifying cocaine addiction. Under increasing threat from the DEA in 1986 for importing seventy-five tons of marijuana into the United States, he quit the trade - and the drugs - and began working with recovering addicts in Santa Barbara. Despite his life change, the authorities caught up with him years later and O'Dea was arrested, tried, and sentenced to ten years at Terminal Island Federal Penitentiary in Los Angeles Harbor.

Lina was a precocious toddler - charming, chatty, joyful. At the age of three, in the aftermath of her second MMR vaccine, first came a seizure, and then, to her parents’ horror, the loss of Lina’s ability to play, use language, and control her impulses. Over the next few years they continued to lose Lina. She communicated her acute discomfort by biting, screaming, hitting, laughing maniacally, and throwing violent tantrums.

An honest and compelling memoir, Girl in Need of a Tourniquet is Merri Lisa Johnson’s account of her borderline personality disorder and how it has affected her life and relationships. Johnson describes the feeling of "bleeding out" unable to tell where she stopped and where her partner began. A self-confessed "psycho girlfriend," she was influenced by many emotional factors from her past. She recalls her path through a dysfunctional, destructive relationship, while recounting the experiences that brought her to her breaking point.

Diagnosed as severely autistic at the age of three, Tito, nearly nonverbal, was brought up by his loving mother Soma, who taught him to read English and challenged him to write his own stories. The initial result was The Mind Tree, published in 2003, which Tito wrote between the ages of eight and 11. The Gold of the Sunbeams is an equally impressive, beautiful collection of stories, each prefaced by a charming note from Tito explaining how the story came into being.

Are you in an abusive or unhappy relationship? Do you try too hard to please your friends at the expense of your own needs and wants? Are you subservient to others and do you find yourself unable to become independent? Do you suffer from negative self-talk? These are all signs that your self-care regimen is deficient in some way. The Smart Girl's Guide to Self-Care tackles the common problems of effective self-care with practical suggestions for practices that will create a sustainable, lifelong self-care routine.

Suffering from depression but desperate for 'normality', Rachel Cullen found herself in failing relationships, the wrong career and a reliance on alcohol and chocolate to get her through each day. Stuck in an endless cycle of mental misery, she put on a pair of old trainers. She'd never been able to think of herself as a 'runner' before, and the first time she forced herself out the door, she knew it would hurt. Everywhere. She just didn't realise how much it would heal her, too.

One of the funniest and most poignant books ever written about a mental illness, Agorafabulous! is a hilarious, raw, and unforgettable account of how a terrified young woman, literally trapped by her own imagination, evolved into a (relatively) high-functioning professional smartass. Down to earth and seriously funny, Benincasa's no-holds-barred revelations offer listeners the politically incorrect hilarity they heartily crave, yet is so often missing from your typical, weepy, and redemptive personal memoir.

The shark attacked while she was snorkeling, tearing through Micki Glenn’s breast and shredding her right arm. Her husband, a surgeon, saved her life on the spot, but when she was safely home she couldn’t just go on with her life. She had entered an even more profound survival journey: the aftermath. The survival experience changes everything because it invalidates all your previous adaptations, and the old rules don’t apply. In some cases survivors suffer more in the aftermath than they did during the actual crisis. In all cases, they have to work hard to reinvent themselves.

In Second Firsts, Rasmussen walks you through her Life Reentry process to help you break grief's spiral of pain, so you can stop simply surviving and begin to live again. She shows you that loss can actually be a powerful catalyst to creating a life that is in alignment with your true passions and values. The resilience, strength, and determination that have gotten you through this difficult time are the same characteristics that will help you craft your wonderful new life.

This renowned journalist's classic Pulitzer Prize winning investigation of schizophrenia - now reissued with a new postscript - follows a flamboyant and fiercely intelligent young woman as she struggles in the throes of mental illness. "Sylvia Frumkin" was born in 1948 and began showing signs of schizophrenia in her teens. She spent the next seventeen years in and out of mental institutions. In 1978, reporter Susan Sheehan took an interest in her and, for more than two years, became immersed in her life.

When he was three years old, Tito was diagnosed as severely autistic, but his remarkable mother, Soma, determined that he would overcome the "problem" by teaching him to read and write. The result was that between the ages of eight and eleven he wrote stories and poems of exquisite beauty, which Dr. Oliver Sacks called "amazing and shocking". Their eloquence gave lie to all our assumptions about autism....

Growing up the good girl in an Irish American family full of drinkers and terrible sleepers, Kathleen Frazier was 12 when her seemingly innocent sleepwalking turned dangerous. Over the next few years, she was a popular A+ student by day, the star of her high school musical. At night she both longed for and dreaded sleep. Frazier moved to Manhattan in the 1980s, hoping for a life in the theater but getting a run of sleepwalking performances instead.

Having conducted over 100 hours of interviews with 60 British women aged 16-25, Nancy Tucker - the author of The Time In Between, an ‘astonishingly good’ (Sunday Times) memoir of a life consumed by eating disorders – explores what it’s like to suffer from serious mental illness as a young woman. With raw honesty, sensitivity and humour, That Was When People Started to Worry examines real experiences of anxiety, self-harm, borderline personality disorder, OCD, binge eating disorder, PTSD and dissociative identity disorder. Giving a voice to those like Abby who can’t speak out themselves, Tucker presents a unique window into the day-to-day trials of living with an unwell mind.

The Hunger Fix lays out a science-based three-stage plan that shows us how to break our addiction to False Fixes and replace them with healthier rewards. Fun fitness activities, customized meal plans, and delicious, satisfying recipes are designed to trigger the specific neurochemical cascade that stimulates your body’s reward system, reclaims your hijacked brain, and supports your lifelong recovery.

As a woman used to traveling and living the high life in Bangkok, Leanne Shirtliffe recognized the constant fodder for humor while pregnant with twins in Asia's sin city. But in spite of deep-fried bug cuisine and nurses who cover newborn bassinets with plastic wrap, Shirtliffe manages to keep her babies alive for a year with help from a Coca-Cola deliveryman, several waitresses, and a bra factory. Then she and her husband return home to the isolation of North American suburbia.

After knowing friends with anorexia and being baffled by their behavior, Laura Moisin suddenly found herself prone to the same disease - not eating at all and going weeks at a time consuming nothing but water and the occasional black coffee. Deceiving therapists by misleading them with symptoms of depression, her anorexia is prolonged, and her health deteriorates rapidly.

Mr. A. was admitted to Dr. Joel Gold’s inpatient unit at Bellevue Hospital in 2002. He was, he said, being filmed constantly, and his life was being broadcast around the world "like The Truman Show" - the 1998 film depicting a man who is unknowingly living out his life as the star of a popular soap opera. Over the next few years, Gold saw a number of patients suffering from what he and his brother, Dr. Ian Gold, began calling the "Truman Show Delusion," launching them on a quest to understand the nature of this particular phenomenon and the nature of madness itself.

Realistic advice from Zoë Kim, author of the popular minimalism blog The Minimalist Plate, offers guidance and support based on her continued experience of incorporating the principles of minimalism into her family life. With Minimalism for Families you’ll find everything you need to begin incorporating the principles of minimalism today.

A veteran clinical psychologist exposes why doctors, teachers, and parents incorrectly diagnose healthy American children with serious psychiatric conditions. In recent years there has been an alarming rise in the number of American children and youth assigned a mental health diagnosis. Current data from the Centers for Disease Control reveal a 41 percent increase in rates of ADHD diagnoses over the past decade and a forty-fold spike in bipolar disorder diagnoses. Similarly, diagnoses of autism spectrum disorder has increased by 78 percent since 2002.

There is no denying that the emotional bond between horses and the humans who love them can reach mystical proportions, and nowhere is that relationship more evident than in these 24 true-life accounts of horses rescuing people. Many of the stories recount incidents where death or physical injury was imminent, and only because a horse intervened are the narrators alive to tell the tale.