Mental Health Book List

Over the years, I have felt inspired, educated, and intrigued by the following books listed below. Each one is related to mental health. Some books are memoirs, others are novels. I hope there is at least one of these books available at your public or campus library.

~ The Center Cannot Hold by Elyn R. Saks = A true, often witty, more often harrowing story of the author's experiences as a schizophrenic attending law school at some of the most prestigious universities in the world. She is also on TedTalks discussing her illness. Also, she is on UCTelevision's youtube channel talking about her experiences and her knowledge of mental health and the law.

~ An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison = A lively true story written in flowing prose. Dr. Jamison was diagnosed with bipolar disorder while holding prestigious research positions at top medical universities. Quite the prolific writer, Dr. Jamison has written a number of books that are important reads (see, "Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide", and "Touched by Fire").

~ Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Except More So by Mark Vonnegut = A memoir by a doctor slash writer slash schizophrenic who overcomes his diagnosis, completes medical school, and becomes a brilliant, witty, and charming doctor slash writer slash person with bipolar disorder with psychosis.

~ Madness by Marya Hornbacher = A memoir of bipolarity, eating disorders, and the creation of multiple wonderful memoirs by a woman whose talented writing surpasses the difficulties she suffered due to numerous diagnoses. Her book, "Wasted", is another amazing literary achievement.

~Wasted by Marya Hornbacher = A memoir of a talented writer hounded by the demons of food obsession and restriction. She focuses this autobiography on her personal experiences as an anorexic slash bulimic and the ways in which her illnesses ruined her relationships and nearly destroyed her health.

~ The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath = A novel based on Plath's real life, this book delves into the tunnel vision of a depressive woman who cannot see how talented she is because she feels only sadness and pain. The tragedy of Sylvia Plath's real life throws a darkness across the pages, but the prose is raw, candid, genuine, and sadly, very prophetic.

~ A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar = A deep, well-researched biography of Dr. John Nash, a mathematical genius who developed paranoid schizophrenia around the time when he was revolutionizing the field of math and science. The movie is excellent as well, but this book deserves special praise for Nasar's in-depth look at the personality of a prodigy whose mind gave birth to both groundbreaking theories and unreal conspiracies.

This is an incomplete list. I have not read every book out there so this list is not comprehensive. The more books I read, the more books I will list here. Have a great night! Thanks for reading.

Anxious about Being Outed

If I suddenly stop blogging it is because I am afraid of being outed as a former mental patient. I try to deceive myself into believing that everyone around me thinks I am crazy due to my quirks and neurotic personality. However, nobody has tried to coral me into the back of an ambulance where a burly EMT and a stretcher with the restraints wait. I must not be as insane as I once was, because before the burly EMT came every year, at least twice.

I prefer calm, dull life to the adrenaline spikes of psychosis and the inevitable period of confinement that followed. I blog just as proof that a former mental patient can lead a calm, dull life just like most of you. I want to show you the inside of a person with real mental illness, the horror, the irony, the ups and the downs. Still, I would not want my professors, classmates, or future employers to know. I can hide safely behind this computer screen from all of you who are critical, but in real life I get enough of that without everybody knowing I am medicated to the gills. If people found out I would be tempted to move. I would leave for a far off place, preferably Sweden.

So, if one day you find that I have deleted this little blog, it is because I got nervous that I may be outed for being certifiable.

Just to cheer myself up, I will now talk about people I admire. Kay Redfield Jamison is a researcher, PhD, and writer. I admire her. Elyn R. Saks is a lawyer, writer, and activist. I admire her. John Nash is a mathematical genius and Noble Prize winner. I admire him. They're all bipolar or schizophrenic. Okay, that cheered me up.

"Hidden America" : Abuse of Mental Patients by Hospitals

Today, Diane Sawyer did a report in her series, "Hidden America" on the plight of mental patients in America. The newest trend in patient abuse is "patient dumping" where the hospital buys a one-way ticket to another state, drives the patient to the Greyhound bus terminal, and sends them to an unknown place so that the hospital and the state won't have to pay for the patients' treatment. If that sounds totally outlandish and fictitious, please click on the link below to watch the video. The reporters did an excellent job of finding documentation that proved at least one hospital repeatedly "patient dumped."

I am a paranoid schizo-affective so I am prone to paranoia and persecution delusions. Yet, sadly, sometimes people really do persecute the mentally ill. We are not chattel. We should not be dehumanized this way. If someone put 80 year old elderly people on a one-way trip to nowhere because they all need dozens of heart, blood pressure, arthritis, kidney, liver, and diabetes medicine, everybody would be in an UPROAR. This would be a major issue, not a tiny side-story whose title says it all "Hidden America."

The abuse of mental patients has a long and gory history in the United States. Lobotomies, barbiturate poisoning, repeated and prolonged restraint use, cases of sexual assault, violent assault, and other negligent treatment leading to death (i.e. heart attacks after prolonged periods of being forced to lie prone in restraints), are all examples of the history of the culturally accepted and widespread abuse of mental patients.

This is sickening. Perfectly innocent victims of a degenerative illness are now victimized by people who appear to be spurred on by some modern day version of the eugenics movement. We are categorically abused because of our brain chemistry, labeled wastes of life, and treated as cockroaches.


If you take this widespread abuse and apply it to another group, like Latinos, Asians, gays, or cancer patients, you would have riots, rebellions, and general anarchy. Nobody deserves to have be treated this way, certainly not mental invalids who are already in a state of fear and panic.

The System has greatly injured my brethren. If you think for one moment that high-functioning mental patients, the families of mental patients, and ethical mental health employees will continue to ignore the abuse and neglect of the poorest, most vulnerable adults among us, you are fooling yourself. The pain of one mental patient is my pain as well. I am high-functioning and I have a long memory. I will not forget. I vow to volunteer for mental health rights organizations, to donate money to the cause, to vote for supportive legislation, and to promote civil rights for mental patients.

For those of you with a mental illness ::: remember, the U.S constitution applies to us! We have civil rights and those who violate our civil rights are traitors to the U.S. constitution.

Here is the link, please watch!

http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/accusations-patient-dumping-19096538

1% of Psychotics Are Violent, I am the 99%

I always hate seeing violence in the news, especially this new massacre in Colorado. Every time there is a random act of violence people start labeling them "psycho," "insane," and lumping all of us law abiding mental cases in with the violent maniacs that take their angst out on innocent people.

It occurred to me that I should quote from a book written by a world renowned criminal profiler. Dr. Hickey has studied serial murderers, mass murderers, sexual deviants, and criminals in general for decades. He has published numerous textbooks on the subjects, including this one, "Serial Murderers and Their Victims," fifth ed., published in 2010. Here is a quote from that textbook:

"...[Souza in 2002] found that although mass murderers will most likely have a history of both childhood trauma and violent behavior, most do not have any significant history of institutionalization (Hickey, p. 59, 2010)."
        ---So, essentially, the bulk of mass murderers have never seen the inside of a psych ward. They appear to be normal, unlike the majority of schizophrenics, who stand out like a sore thumb in society and are constantly admitted into psychiatric facilities for behavioral modification, medication, and confinement.

Later on, the book states, "Henn, Herjanic, and Vanderpearl (1976) examined the psychiatric assessments of nearly 2,000 persons arrested for homicide between 1964 and 1973 and noted that only 1% were considered to be psychotic (Hickey, p. 62, 2010)."

This is not anecdotal stories that I just made up. This is genuine research conducted by PhD's who are at the top of their fields. Maybe this criminal is insane, if so, he is that 1% of mentally ill people who perpetrate crimes. Please do not take your anger out on the law abiding 99%!!

For those of you who do not know this, there is a state mandate that says if you have ever been put on a "5150" hold, meaning that you are judged to be a threat to yourself or to others or you are incapable of caring for yourself, you are prohibited from possessing or purchasing a fire arm for at least five years! The most chronic cases, those of us who are repeat mental patients in psych wards, are fairly likely to NEVER own a hand gun, due to the fact that every couple of years we are hospitalized.

Let us not forget that the bulk of crimes are committed by sociopaths. Sociopathy is a personality disorder, not a neuro-chemical imbalance that is inherited from one's genetics. Sociopaths are cunning, deceitful, sane, and organized (usually organized, there are some that are classified as "disorganized"). Schizophrenics are totally scatterbrained, bewildered, frightened, and busy with their internal worlds of make believe voices and visions.

Just like race, please do not discriminate due to mental disability. We are not gun wielding maniacs. We fear the gun wielding maniacs as much as the next person, even more so, because the after math affects how everyone treats mental patients, which often involves indirect victimization of innocent schizophrenics.

I  urge you to follow the laws set forth by the constitution. I vow to follow the constitution. Please do not violate the constitution.

My sympathies are with the victims of the Colorado massacre. I am glad they apprehended the person responsible. I await his day in court with the rest of the nation.

Thank you for reading. Please have a good day!

An Excellent Book On Schizophrenia by Elyn Saks

I just ordered this book, The Center Cannot Hold by Elyn R. Saks, through amazon dot com and it arrived yesterday. I have read all of 24 pages and I'm hooked. It's the kind of book that gets me so excited I can't sit still. 24 pages into this memoir of psychosis and I had to set it down and take a long walk while listening to industrial techno music. I felt the euphoria of someone who had just found somebody who was like myself.

Yes, 24 pages is all it took to make me endorse a book I barely read. From the opening scene at the Yale Law school library's rooftop to the admission of early drug use to her parents--- that's as far as I got before I realized I was reading a book up there with An Unquiet Mind and Prozac Nation.

I am so excited about this book I felt like promoting it before I even finished it. True, only a few people visit this blog, but to you, the random one person who accidentally stumbled here, I encourage you to purchase this book and give it a read.

Due to the nature of schizophrenia it is difficult to find a writer who can detail her/his illness with clarity and insight, as the illness can rob us sufferers of clarity of thought. Many of the memoirs on schizophrenia are written by the close relatives of people who suffer from the disease. There are some notable exceptions, such as the son of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. who wrote Eden's Express (Mark Vonnegut).

Elyn R. Saks really comes out as a major prose writer, as well as a memoir writer, which makes her writing all the more powerful. At one point, she writes that she felt like an "insect on a pin" while being admitted to a psychiatric facility. This is too true. Sad, but honest and well-written.

Please purchase this book! It is a good way to see that a schizophrenic is just a person with a cognitive disability, someone who can nonetheless achieve goals in life.

Here's a link to the book on amazon dot com.
http://www.amazon.com/Center-Cannot-Hold-Journey-Through

Electra's Complex 102

Wow, reading that last entry was kind of sad for me.
I didn't mean to vent, I just, well, yeah, I needed to vent.
Anyways this isn't all a suicide survivor blog, it's more like an emotional eating blog, and my issues therein.

But for those of you who run around looking down your nose at obese people, please stop, you have no idea what they have/are going through.

Like I stated in the first blog entry, I whittled myself down from a size 5 to a size 2 at the age of 18 after my uncle's death.

Years later, after being put on Zyprexa, an anti-psychotic drug, I gained a whopping 50 pounds in a very short time span. You may have heard of Zyprexa, it was in the news because hundreds of patients were suing the pharmaceutical company for failing to mention that taking Zyprexa makes one gain upwards of 100 pounds and the drug even causes diabetes in some people. Everyone who was on Zyprexa that I know of had nothing kind to say about it: "It worked, yeah, but I got diabetes now!" It seems the rush to market a miracle sanity drug was a bad move on the part of pharmaceutical companies, a decision that cost lots of people their physical health. Myself, I suffered a huge weight gain from my pre-Zyprexa normal weight of 115 to 160 lbs.
I remember being chastised by an art teacher on my bad eating habits after I brought in a fast food breakfast. I just nodded and went along with it. She didn't know that the pills were making me feel super hungry, especially for foods high in fat, that the pills likely slowed my metabolism down, and that I normally didn't eat at Carl's Jr for breakfast. The rest of the class stared at my new flabby gut and then looked away. I could feel the disgust. I felt it myself. So from that point on, at the age of 22, I began to yo yo diet, binge eat, starve, exercise, and binge eat more. I went of my medication, then back on, then back off, then back on....

At one point, when I was feeling very disliked in my lowly post as a pizza delivery girl, I managed to drop my weight down to 134, slightly acceptable for my height (5'1), but just barely. Of course, I was eating nothing for breakfast, coffee and a small salad for lunch, and a slice of pizza for dinner.  On the outside I had done what society wanted me to do: lose weight. I was no longer a blemish on the face of American culture. No longer another statistic of fat women. I was acceptable. Behind the facade, I was a wreck. I was stuck in an abusive relationship with my high school science lab partner, skipping my medication, and beginning to hear voices telling me how horrible I was. My mother, thankfully, insisted I be admitted to the county psychiatric facility. I slowly improved with medication and distanced myself from that abusive person.
Unfortunately, my weight increased. There's a well known government study that proves if a person starves themselves the body will begin to hoard calories away like  a squirrel with nuts. Once you eat, it is nearly impossible to burn off those calories, as your body knows that you may starve at any time. It's natural. Can't outwit biology. I gained all my weight back, and then some.

I'm 28 now and I've returned to the University as a senior to complete my BA. By the time mid-terms hit, I was sitting around studying for hours, not getting enough exercise aside from daily long walks, and I reached 194. That's obese. I panicked. I began running and dieting. I stopped running because I had such large breasts that people would comment, or leer at me. I went down by about 30 pounds in a matter of months. I was suddenly more energetic and I felt good about myself because I wasn't eating animal meat anymore, which I always considered to be a cruel practice.

So anyways, here I am, medicated, grieving over my lost cousin, and eating a salad with spicy ranch. I weigh 173. That's up from last week, before I was told about my cousin's suicide, but my weight is significantly lower than my worst point.

Yes, I know, Ranch dressing has lots of calories. But I walk around in 100 degree heat for hours because I have no car, so I figure I am burning off those Ranch calories.

Anyways, now you know most of me. The rest of this blog will be on random topics. Mostly, I want to explore my health, both physical and mental. I will be posting lists of books I've read that helped me through difficult times, some good vegetarian recipes, places to buy bras that cater to big breasted women, and blog posts chronicling my struggle with life and death.

Mostly I started this blog because I couldn't find a forum that addressed the issues I find most pressing: how to cope with hardships without taking it out on your body. How to adjust to a highly stigmatized mental illness. How to lose weight without developing an eating disorder. How to exist happily with myself while acknowledging that I don't always make the best decisions for myself.

The next blog will be on a lighter note: how to find a bra that fits.