An Autobiography Of A Man With A Psychiatric Disorder

This book gives us the rare and meaningful insight that is not often found in the world of psychiatry and mental health, an area that, even today, a large proportion of society still associates with stigma and shame. This book is invaluable in that it presents a patients perspective to the reader, shedding new light on the amount of suffering a mental illness such as schizophrenia can cause. We are taken on a journey of the life of this man right from his earliest school days till present. We read and learn about the author as a young boy, a student, and as a young man when the first symptoms of his illness began to manifest. We then follow the whole course of the author's struggle with his illness and recovery. Throughout the entire course of the narrative, the author does a brilliant job of explaining the thoughts, the experiences, and the struggle he experienced as a victim of mental illness in such a way that the reader is unable to read without empathizing and question how it would feel if their own mind were to turn against them in such a way.

When he was twenty-four years old, Clifford Whittingham Beers was interred in a mental asylum. He remained there for three years, battling his mental illness. In his autobiography, A Mind That Found Itself, he recounts the civil war that took place in his mind. The publication of this book in 1908 caused huge public outcry and began an inquiry into the state of mental health care. It contributed significantly to the beginnings of the modern mental health movement. As part of our mission to publish great works of literary Fiction and nonFiction, Sheba Blake Publishing Corp. is extremely dedicated to bringing to the forefront the amazing works of long dead and truly talented authors.

This book is a memoir of ravages of mental illness. A Mind That Found Itself tells the story of a young man who was gradually devastated by mental illness. His caring family sent him to a series of psychiatric hospitals, but he was cruelly treated, and his brief rational moments became less and less. His ultimate recovery is the victory of the human spirit.

"A pen rather than a lance has been my weapon of offence and defence; with its point I should prick the civic conscience and bring into a neglected field men and women who should act as champions for those afflicted thousands least able to fight for themselves." In 1900, after suffering a mental breakdown, Clifford Whittingham Beers was confined to an asylum for three years. After his recovery he wrote this biography, which aroused a storm of protest and public concern about care of people with mental illness. In the eyes of many the modern mental health movement can be traced to this publication. At once a classic account of the ravages of mental illness and a major American autobiography, A Mind That Found Itself tells the story of a young man who is gradually enveloped by a psychosis. His well-meaning family commits him to a series of mental hospitals, but he is brutalized by the treatment, and his moments of fleeting sanity become fewer and fewer. His ultimate recovery is a triumph of the human spirit. The publication of A Mind That Found Itself did for the American mental health movement what Thomas Paine's Common Sense did for the American Revolution. Moreover, it grips the imagination of readers not because it is a document of social reform but because it is a superb narrative. As the distinguished psychiatrist and writer Robert Coles has noted, the book provides the virtues of clinical analysis, as well as personal reminiscence, all rendered with a novelists eye for the particular, for emotional nuance, for chronological progression. . . . Steadily, forthrightly, we come in touch with the nature of delusions and hallucinations: the complex, symbolically charged, nightmarish world of fear, suspicion, irritability and truculence. Recovered from his illness, Beers began a lifelong crusade, through the National Committee for Mental Hygiene and the American Foundation for Mental Hygiene, to revolutionize the care and treatment of the mentally ill. The persuasive chronicler of mental illness became a sophisticated, pragmatic organizer and reformer. A Mind That Found Itself is Beer's personal history of a mental civil war which he fought single-handed on a battlefield that lay within the compass of his skull. It was first published in 1908 but remains compelling and clinically accurate--an unforgettable reading experience. "I am not telling the story of my life just to write a book. I tell it because it seems my plain duty to do so. A narrow escape from death and a seemingly miraculous return to health after an apparently fatal illness are enough to make a man ask himself: For what purpose was my life spared? That question I have asked myself, and this book is, in part, an answer."

How do you truly understand what it means to be a person, any person, a person struggling with mental illness? The author explores that difficult question in this "autobiography of sorts", not only from his perspective as a psychiatrist, but as someone whose mother was afflicted with a long-standing severe mental illness, and as someone with dedicated interest in both the sciences and the humanities. Early in his career, Dr. Strauss contributed the "multiaxial" structure to a diagnostic manual for psychiatry in an effort to include the many aspects of human functioning in psychiatric thinking. He showed with his colleague William Carpenter that people with schizophrenia can get better, and he has written extensively on how people with severe psychiatric disorders experience their lives and act to contribute to the processes of their own improvement. Using the lens of his medical training and years spent treating patients, as well as stories and perspectives gained from the various experiences in his life more generally - such as time spent hitchhiking for three months and 9000 miles around the US, extended periods in Paris working and writing with French friends including noted psychiatrists and a clown who works in an adult palliative care center - this autobiography serves to combine these into an approach towards understanding people and mental health as a human science, an approach that uses the rigors of medicine along with an appreciation of the depth and complexity of everyday life.

A Sunday Times Bestseller Have you ever had a strange urge to jump from a tall building, or steer your car into oncoming traffic? You are not alone. In this captivating fusion of science, history and personal memoir, writer David Adam explores the weird thoughts that exist within every mind, and how they drive millions of us towards obsessions and compulsions. 'One of the best and most readable studies of a mental illness to have emerged in recent years . . . an honest and open and, yes, maybe life-changing work' – Matt Haig, Observer Told with fierce clarity, humour and urgent lyricism, this extraordinary book is both the haunting story of a personal nightmare, and a fascinating doorway into the darkest corners of our minds. David has suffered from obsessive compulsive disoder (OCD) for twenty years, and The Man Who Couldn't Stop is his unflinchingly honest attempt to understand the condition and his experiences. What might lead an Ethiopian schoolgirl to eat a wall of her house, piece by piece; or a pair of brothers to die beneath an avalanche of household junk that they had compulsively hoarded? At what point does a harmless idea, a snowflake in a clear summer sky, become a blinding blizzard of unwanted thoughts? Drawing on the latest research on the brain, as well as historical accounts of patients and their treatments, this is a book that will challenge the way you think about what is normal, and what is mental illness.

This book gives us the rare and meaningful insight that is not often to be found in the world of psychiatry and mental health, an area which even today a large proportion of society still associates with stigma and shame. The main reason the author chose to devote his time to this project was to help raise awareness about mental health, particularly in India. This book is invaluable in that it presents a patient's perspective to the reader, shedding new light on the amount of suffering a mental illness such as schizophrenia can cause. The quality of mental health care in India, the social stigma arising from such an illness when described by someone who has firsthand personal experience makes a greater impact.One of the greatest successes of the author in writing this book is in the lucid way he presents his material. We, as the reader, are taken on a journey of the life of this man right from his earliest school days till present, we read and learn about the author as a young boy, a student, and as a young man when the first symptoms of his illness begin to manifest. We then follow the whole course of the authors' struggle with his illness, his slow, then rapid decline, and then recovery. Throughout the entire course of the narrative the author does a brilliant job of explaining the thoughts, the experiences and the struggle he experienced as a victim of mental illness in such a way that the reader is unable to read without empathizing and question how it would feel if their own mind were to turn against them in such a way.The mental health care available in India is another pertinent question that this book raises , true we have come a long way from the days of asylums and isolations, with social acceptability slowly increasing and treatments now being much more effective and available , we still have a long way to go, to reach all those who are suffering. There is a dire need for increased awareness about mental health throughout India particularly in rural areas, an issue which needs to be taken up at the national level. Works like this help to forward the cause

"The Outsider is an unsentimental yet profoundly moving look at one family's experience with mental illness. The Outsider moves beyond more straightforward accounts of mental illness to create a suspenseful and moving account of a son's search for the truth behind his father's haunted, solitary existence. It is a memoir of a father's fight to survive with dignity, and a son's struggle to know the father he lost to schizophrenia long before he finally lost him to death."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved