Schizophrenia Mental Illness

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.

Since its first publication in 1983, Surviving Schizophrenia has become the standard reference book on the disease that has helped thousands of patients, their families, and mental health professionals alike. In clear language, this much-praised and important book describes the nature, causes, symptoms, treatment, and course of schizophrenia, and explores living with it from both the patient’s and the family’s point of view.

Despite all her best efforts to break the cycle of catastrophic, destructive patterns of mental illness, Anna Berry found herself at the end of her rope - unemployed, penniless, homeless, and in the throes of a psychotic episode that threatened to destroy her life. Alone and unwell, she manages to find her grip on life, seeks the help she needs, and embarks on a life and career that illustrate that mental illness does not have to be ruinous.

Broken Brain, Fortified Faith is the story of one family's journey through schizophrenia, navigating the uncharted waters of mental illness to find help for their daughter, Amber, and support for their family. This memoir is an honest look at the stress, anger, education, and finally, hope experienced through eyes of a mother. Along the way, she questions her trust in God as their family encounters setbacks, inadequate treatments, and additional family health crises.

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.

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.

The thrust of this book is nutrition and complimentary therapies for digital addiction, anxiety, bipolar, depression, and schizophrenia. Useful resources to find authoritative information on all the included mental disorders from the American medical perspective are included. Truisms that have been passed down through the ages about mental health that have stood the rigors of scientific inquiry are presented. The role of nutrition in ameliorating anxiety is discussed.