The Psych Ward Notes

What happens when your first memories of life and conscious awareness centered around death and mental illness? You end up with a mental illness or illnesses. This book is an autobiography/documentary about Peter Vox, a retired school teacher and professional musician from Long Island, NY who has spent his life battling anxiety, depression and existential sadness. This book chronicles Peter's childhood, the origins of his mental illnesses, history with medications, decades spent in therapy, marriage, careers, journals written from psychiatric hospitals and theories on how to handle your own mental illness. Furthermore, it's also a book about learning from past mistakes, accepting your flaws, focusing on your positive attributes, accepting help from others and realizing that there are opportunities to start over in life if you are open minded and willing to make small changes. Along with chronicles of Peter's struggles are highly amusing anecdotes about Peter's life that show the happy go lucky person that lives somewhere in all of us.

- Applicable not just to those with mental health issues, but for churches and the church at large

Mark and Giulia's life together began as a storybook romance. They fell in love at eighteen, married at twenty-four, and were living their dream life in San Francisco. When Giulia was twenty-seven, she suffered a terrifying and unexpected psychotic break that landed her in the psych ward for nearly a month. One day she was vibrant and well-adjusted; the next she was delusional and suicidal, convinced that she was the devil and that her loved ones were not safe. All she wanted was to die. Eventually, Giulia fully recovered, and the couple had a son. But, soon after Jonas was born, Giulia had another breakdown, and then a third a few years after that. pushed to the edge of the abyss, everything the couple had once taken for granted was upended. A story of the fragility of the mind, and the tenacity of the human spirit, My Lovely Wife is, above all, a love story that raises profound questions: How do we care for the people we love? What and who do we live for? Breathtaking in its candor, radiant with compassion, and written with dazzling lyricism, Lukach's is an intensely personal odyssey through the harrowing years of his wife's mental illness, anchored by an abiding devotion to family that will affirm readers' faith in the power of love.

Master of razor-edged literary humor Binnie Kirshenbaum returns with her first novel in a decade, a devastating, laugh-out-loud funny story of a writer’s slide into depression and institutionalization. It’s New Year’s Eve, the holiday of forced fellowship, mandatory fun, and paper hats. While dining out with her husband and their friends, Kirshenbaum’s protagonist—an acerbic, mordantly witty, and clinically depressed writer—fully unravels. Her breakdown lands her in the psych ward of a prestigious New York hospital, where she refuses all modes of recommended treatment. Instead, she passes the time chronicling the lives of her fellow “lunatics” and writing a novel about what brought her there. Her story is a brilliant and brutally funny dive into the disordered mind of a woman who sees the world all too clearly. Propelled by razor-sharp comic timing and rife with pinpoint insights, Kirshenbaum examines what it means to be unloved and loved, to succeed and fail, to be at once impervious and raw. Rabbits for Food shows how art can lead us out of—or into—the depths of disconsolate loneliness and piercing grief. A bravura literary performance from one of our most indispensable writers.

I know it's no excuse but I am just a 20 year old trying to wipe the tears of the 8 year old that died inside of me, so forgive me if it feels like I am just not here with you... I have journeyed into the past trying to convince that little girl to set me free but she sits at the bottom of my heart telling me I can't abandon her like everyone else so forgive me when I seem distant today, I am just trying to be there for that little girl that died inside of me while you assumed she grew up - M.R.S Welcome to the thoughts of a girl who was admitted into the psych ward after writing the first few pages of this book. Join her in her journey to the psych ward and her journey in the psych ward.

An extraordinary account of life behind the locked doors of a secure psychiatric ward from a nurse who worked there for seven years. Dennis O'Donnell started work as an orderly in the Intensive Psychiatric Care Unit of a large hospital in Scotland in 2000. In his daily life he encountered fear, violence and despair but also a considerable amount of care and compassion. Recounting the stories of the patients he worked with, and those of his colleagues on the ward, here he examines major mental health conditions, methods of treatment - medication, how religion, sex, wealth, health and drugs can bear influence on mental health, the prevailing attitudes to psychiatric illness, the authorities, the professionals & society. What emerges is a document of humanity and humour, a remarkable memoir that sheds light on a world that still remains largely unknown. 'This is a superb study of people whose minds have gone wrong, and the art of caring for them' Evening Standard

The riveting true story of an aspiring psychiatrist's year of discovery, frustration, and triumph, this shockingly candid memoir is a real-life One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Emotionally charged --Kirkus.

How does a woman who had a "normal" middle-class upbringing in a Catholic home end up incarcerated twice and admitted into the psychiatric ward of the hospital for observation? Where did things turn and how did she fight to re-gain her life? Follow her journey through her relationships, including the most tumultuous, controlling, abusive one, that shaped her into the warrior-God following-advocate she is striving to be today.