A BIBLIOGRAPHY ON AND RESOURCES FOR MENTAL ILLNESS
Our 20-year-old daughter was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 2001. We were desperate to find out more about this mysterious and devastating illness. We were also interested in learning more about mental illness in general. The following works proved very helpful at the time and later. I realize, of course, that this is just a starter list.
E. Fuller Torrey, M.D., Surviving Schizophrenia: A Manual for Families, Consumers, and Providers. (Now in its 7th edition, having originally appeared in 1983, this was our go-to book on the subject. We were all the more drawn to this man’s work because he grew up in our area of Upstate New York and his sister had the illness.)
Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind: A Biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr., Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, 1994. (The 1998 book immediately gave rise to the superb 2001 movie directed by Ron Howard and starring Russell Crowe.)
Elyn R. Saks, The Center Cannot Hold. (A law student starts suffering from schizophrenia before she can finish her degree. She later does complete it and manages to live an amazingly high-functioning life. The italics for the ill person’s interior monologues are especially striking and, in our experience, true-to-life.)
Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness. (The author learns to cope with her bipolar disorder and becomes a successful professor of psychiatry.)
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I’m adding these other entries:
Rebecca Chamaa’s blog: http://www.ajourneywithyou.com
(The full title of her blog is: A Journey with You—Surviving Schizophrenia. I met Rebecca at a May 2019 meeting of the San Diego Memoir Writers Association, where she spoke as a panelist in a session titled “Writing on Mental Health.” Rebecca later kindly sent me a booklet for my daughter to help her work through her days.)
Just out or forthcoming:
Robert Kolker, Hidden Valley Road. (This recent biography (2020) tells the life of a Colorado family in which 6 of the 12 children were diagnosed as schizophrenic. To one of the brothers, who did not succumb to the illness and who played hockey with his brothers, “it was as if three of the most important people in the world…had fallen off the face of the earth.”)
W.J.T. Mitchell, Mental Traveler: A Father, a Son, and a Journey through Schizophrenia. (Another 2020 release, scheduled for September, this book introduces us to a talented young man, diagnosed with schizophrenia at age 21, who takes his own life 18 years later. Told by the father, this story follows, in the words of the University of Chicago Press website, the son’s “declared ambition…to transform schizophrenia from a death sentence to a learning experience, and madness from a curse to a critical perspective.”
My own work on the subject:
John C. O’Neal, “Working to Stay Sane,” in A Year in Ink, vol. 13 (2020). An anthology published by San Diego Writers, Ink, forthcoming. (Relates an exchange between father and daughter that validates the real work involved in dealing with the everyday challenges of schizophrenia.)
—, “Understanding and Interpreting Confusion: Philippe Pinel and the Invention of Psychiatry,” in The Progressive Poetics of Confusion in the French Enlightenment (U of Delaware P, 2011), 178-93. Also published in Lumen. Travaux choisis de la Société canadienne d’étude du dix-huitième siècle. Selected Proceedings from the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies 26 (2007): 243-258. (Describes the early history of psychiatry in France. The notes will lead you to further reading in many other sources.)
If you read French, these are worth looking at:
Philippe Pinel, L’Aliénation mentale ou la manie: Traité medico-philosophique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006). (Originally published in 1801, this work first puts forth Pinel’s “traitement moral,” which can be seen as the precursor to today’s psychotherapy.)
—, Traité medico-philosophique sur l’aliénation mentale. New York, Arno Press, 1976. (The second edition of the above work, published in 1809. Standing today near the Gare d’Austerlitz and the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris is a bronze statue of Pinel liberating the mentally ill from the chains in which they were bound before his arrival at the hospital across the street.)