Schizophrenia Memoirs

Esmé Weijun Wang was officially diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder in 2013, although the hallucinations and psychotic episodes had started years before that. In the midst of a high functioning life at Yale, Stanford and the literary world, she would find herself floored by an overwhelming terror that 'spread like blood', or convinced that she was dead, or that her friends were robots, or spiders were eating holes in her brain.

Richard Carlson Jr. was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia when he was 21 years of age. His illness first manifested when he was an early adolescent. Modern psychiatry greatly failed Richard for over a decade. Then, after an incident involving the police, he truly understood that his diagnosis was real, and finally began the long process of recovery. Over 10 years later, his life is greatly improved. In the course of his treatment, Richard also recovered from depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and lethargy.

This is the very personal and frank account of A.W.J. Pilgrim’s battle with schizophrenia, in the context of his whole life story. He is a Londoner, dad and talented prolific artist painter and author. Learn how his illness progressed, how he struggled, his personal thoughts about it, detailed accounts of being sectioned, effects of medications, psychosis, hallucinations & delusions. The story not all sad, he has had some good luck too, and still has dreams. Learn how he has put his schizophrenia into remission.

In I'll Give You Something to Cry About, Elizabeth Acker gives a stunning account of growing up under the abusive control of an emotionally and mentally ill mother. Elizabeth is forced to become estranged from her father, and struggles alone to create hope and meaning for her life, while serving her mother like a slave. This audiobook is a true account of a daughter's struggle to survive a mother with paranoia, schizophrenia, and manic depression.

Searching for answers everywhere has led you to believe your beloved child might have schizophrenia. You can only find horror stories on the illness, that is when you’re able to understand the lengthy and confusing medical terminology at all.

Mark Vonnegut set out in search of Eden with his VW bug, his girlfriend, his dog, and his ideals, but genetic predisposition and a whole lot of shit going down made him crazy in a culture that told him mental illness is a myth and schizophrenia is a sane response to an insane society. Describing his experiences during the late '60s and early '70s, Eden Express reveals how Mark went from being a recent college grad who was in love and living communally on a farm to having nervous breakdowns.

Epilepsy Memoir: A 45-Year Epilepsy Zen Detour - A detour from the "normal life" gentlemen, line up your cars, start your engines, green flag, gun your engines, go! Genesis of the epilepsy, the beginning of the electric highway and the ups and downs of epilepsy, depression, correctly diagnosed stress anxiety syndrome and correctly diagnosed panic attacks syndrome, and misdiagnosed paranoid schizophrenia, supposedly all three-psyche nonsense are active which is a load of frozen hockey pucks.

Imagine losing your grip on reality and plunging into a nightmarish yet fantastical realm of schizophrenia. This memoir is one Harvard grad's account of several psychotic episodes he's endured over the years. A constant pause-resister, the adrenaline doses keep coming from start to finish. These vivid accounts of psychoses put the listeners in a front-row seat of some of the spectacular recesses of human imagination - only the listener has the option to check out at any time.

A Journey Through a Psychotic Breakdown shatters taboos about coping with mental illness. Written in first-person, this story by Douglas Gonçalves tells the moving account of the executive when he faced a psychotic episode that made him a spectator of his own fate and changed his life forever. The author’s account provokes reflections on the current causes that trigger this disease and demystifies the issue. According to medical statistics, one in four people will have mental health problems throughout their lives, which will greatly affect their personal, professional, and social existence.

At the age of 30, Jake found himself hospitalized, grappling with the weight of anxiety, depression, and paranoia. Soon, he received the life-altering diagnosis of schizophrenia. In this intimate and illuminating book, you are invited into Jake's world, a world he shares with his mother, Laurette, through alternating chapters.

Love for a Deaf Rebel introduces listeners to a vivacious Canadian woman who was born into a silent world and with the foundation for schizophrenia. With pathos and nostalgia, the author recounts his roller-coaster ride with Pearl, a vivacious deaf maverick, who, unknown to him, had paranoid schizophrenia. We follow their encounters through actual notes written before Derrick learns sign language; we go on their motorcycle ride to Mexico and Guatemala; we watch as the happy couple moves to Bowen Island, a British Columbia community with just three paved roads.

Susan Doherty's groundbreaking book brings us a population of lost souls, ill-served by society, feared, shunted from locked wards to rooming houses to the streets to jail and back again. For the past ten years, some of the people who cycle in and out of the severely ill wards of the Douglas Institute in Montreal have found a friend in Susan, who volunteers on the ward, and then follows her friends out into the world as they struggle to get through their days. With their full cooperation, she brings us their stories, which challenge the ways we think about people with mental illness.

Embracing Schizophrenia is the story of Samantha Mercanti’s experience with schizophrenia. The story is light and positive, but at the same time shows the difficulties Samantha experienced, and continues to experience, in her recovery and her life. Embracing Schizophrenia is a story of struggle, strength, resilience, and hope that opens a window onto mental illness and illuminates it, so we can all understand just a little bit better.

I will state that though listed as a memoir, this is for the most part a fiction book subject (epilepsy Zen). They say that Yin Zen questioning is talking to your higher consciousness; epilepsy Zen meditation is contemplating your navel or lower than your tanzen - doorway to the hara and hearing the giant ocean roar from within a fragile seashell and learning the Yang illuminating answer.

In the 1950s, the field of psychiatry had nothing to show for itself. While polio was being cured, antibiotics were being discovered, and cancer research was developing, the mental health world had no wins. Asylums were full and nobody had figured out how to fix insanity—specifically schizophrenia, the severest mental illness. Scientists became convinced that if they could engineer a pill to create madness, then they could cure it.

Dresden 1893: Der ehrgeizige Jurist Dr. Daniel Paul Schreber erleidet nach einer beruflichen Beförderung einen Nervenzusammenbruch. Im darauffolgenden stationären Aufenthalt entwirft Schreber eine Erklärungsschrift, welche seine Mündigkeit wiederherstellen soll und liefert damit ein umfangreiches, unmittelbares Zeugnis eines an paranoider Schizophrenie Erkrankten.

Apollo Ellis's journey from the streets of the 1990s San Francisco Bay Area to the heights of Silicon Valley is a tale of extraordinary resilience. Growing up in a world dominated by hip-hop and street culture, he faced daunting circumstances. Narrow escapes from the drug game and gang violence left their marks in the form of PTSD and addiction. Homeless at the age of twenty, Apollo made the pivotal decision to return to school. Choosing education as his lifeline, he began to reconstruct himself.

Many biographies of people with schizophrenia seem to dwell primarily on the feeling of hopelessness, and they keep expectations for the sufferer's future low. With this autobiography, Mr. Jiang attempts to turn the tables on this litany of sorrow. He shows himself as a result of the miracles that modern medicine can produce. He went from being a basket case to a respected, technologically-savvy medical librarian working at a world-renowned research institution.

This is the moving yet deeply disturbing story of a middle-aged mother and a teenaged daughter torn apart by the sudden onset of the mother’s insanity. It details the severe paranoia and absurd delusions that began to control my mother’s behavior. It follows her transformation from loving parent to violent psychotic and my transformation from obedient daughter to terrified runaway. And it depicts the overwhelming revelatory moment when I finally learned she had died - six years before.

It was the spring of 1989. I was 16 years old, a junior in high school and an honors student. I had what every teenager wants: a stable family, a nice home in the suburbs, a great group of friends, big plans for my future, and no reason to believe that any of that would ever change. Then came my mother's psychosis.