Tale of Terror: Living with Schizophrenia

Tale of Terror: Living with Schizophrenia
Author: Jackie Adams
Publisher: BookLocker.com, Inc.
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2023-05-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

Lucy Manor is an attractive young woman, 22 years old, an only child with loving parents and a mother who loves to cook. She also is a schizophrenic, and has auditory and visual hallucinations that can torment her for hours. Medicine helps for a little while, but sometimes it makes her diagnosis scarier. Her story begins when the living room becomes a complete mess, the lamp overturned, the bookshelves on the floor. The police come, but there is no evidence of a break-in, no fingerprints. Then Lucy meets Brian, a wonderful and affectionate young man who teaches disabled children in the fifth grade, but Lucy is ashamed about telling Brian she is not working and puts Brian off. She can’t work because of her sickness, she wants medication that will let her work, and her doctor gives her some. She starts seeing Brian, starts going with him to church and enjoying life with her family. Lucy starts applying for jobs, gets one at a clothing store she likes, has a good start at it, but then she breaks down at the store, and throws shelves and clothes on the floor. The job is over, and Lucy is in the hospital. She goes back to her doctor, who tells her she can’t work because of her illness. Can a young woman with schizophrenia date? Brian calls to see how she is, a pleasant life begins together, but that doesn’t stop Lucy’s hallucinations. One night she has nightmares all night long. When she wakes up in the middle of the night, she feels a man’s presence in her bedroom. Then she hears “Lucy. Lucy.” She looks out to the tree line trying to see if someone is there. She hesitates then slowly moves closer to the small open field but doesn’t see anyone. Lucy gets new medication and starts her life with Brian again. Dining out, the art museum, a musical, a gallery opening for an old school friend. But then Lucy has a horrid nightmare and wakes up screaming. Her name is called from the window again. Her parents help her recover, and she spends time with Brian again. Brian tells Lucy he wants to marry her and have children, but Lucy tells him she can’t marry him. She can’t have children because of her illness. Brian does not understand, but they stay together. Lucy returns to the painting she did when she was younger, and shows Brian some of her paintings. He is enthusiastic and wants her to have a gallery show. Lucy does a painting of Brian, they show it to the owner of the gallery. he likes it and tells Lucy she can have a show at his gallery. Brian and Lucy are excited, go through Brian’s photographs, and Lucy picks several to paint for her show and paints a pair of elks, a turkey, a father and son flying kites. And a white terrier sticking his head out of an old red truck window.. Then Brian’s roommate moves out, and he asks Lucy if she would like to rent a room in his apartment. She thinks about it. The time for the art gallery show of Lucy’s paintings arrives. It is a charity show that is given for a young boy who has Leukemia. Everybody loves Lucy’s paintings, all of them sold, and a magazine is going to do an article on them. All is well. Lucy is sitting on a rocking chair on the front porch. She follows a voice, which takes her further into the woods. Someone behind her grabs her and holds a cloth over her face. It’s the last thing she remembers before she opens her eyes in a dark, cold room. Her hands are tied behind her chair, and her feet are latched tightly together. The voice says, “I told you I’d get you, I’ve been waiting a long time. I had to trash your house so I could put a camera in your vent.” Lucy is sedated, tasered until she screams, and kept in the dark. Suddenly Lucy wakes up in the middle of the woods. Her hands are no longer tied, her feet are no longer latched. Her parents take her home. When she wakes up she is in a hospital room, and her hands are restrained.

Mind Without a Home

Mind Without a Home
Author: Kristina Morgan
Publisher: Hazelden Publishing
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2013-09-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1616494603

Experience the inner world of a woman with schizophrenia in this brutally honest, lyrical memoir. Have you ever wondered what it is like in the mind of a person with Schizophrenia? How can one survive day after day unable to distinguish between one’s inner nightmares and the everyday realities that most of us take for granted? In her brutally honest, highly original memoir, Kristina Morgan takes us inside her head to experience the chaos, fragmented thinking, and the startling creativity of the schizophrenic mind. With the intimacy of private journal-like entries and the language of a poet, she carries us from her childhood to her teen years when hallucinations began to hijack her mind and into adulthood where she began abusing alcohol to temper the punishing voices that only she could hear. This is no formulaic tale of tragedy and triumph: We feel Kristina’s hope as she pursues an education and career and begins to build strong family connections, friendships and intimacy—and her devastation as the insistent voices convince her to throw it all away, destroying herself and alienating everyone around her. Woven through the pages of her life are stories of recovery from alcoholism and the search for her sexual identity in relationships with both women and men. Eventually, her journey takes her to a place of relative peace and stability where she finds the inner resources and support system to manage her chronic illnesses and live a fulfilling life.

Hidden Valley Road

Hidden Valley Road
Author: Robert Kolker
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 427
Release: 2020-04-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0385543778

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • ONE OF GQ's TOP 50 BOOKS OF LITERARY JOURNALISM IN THE 21st CENTURY • The heartrending story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease. "Reads like a medical detective journey and sheds light on a topic so many of us face: mental illness." —Oprah Winfrey Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins--aspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony--and they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the ten Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen to one family? What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health. Their story offers a shadow history of the science of schizophrenia, from the era of institutionalization, lobotomy, and the schizophrenogenic mother to the search for genetic markers for the disease, always amid profound disagreements about the nature of the illness itself. And unbeknownst to the Galvins, samples of their DNA informed decades of genetic research that continues today, offering paths to treatment, prediction, and even eradication of the disease for future generations. With clarity and compassion, bestselling and award-winning author Robert Kolker uncovers one family's unforgettable legacy of suffering, love, and hope.

To Redeem One Person is to Redeem the World

To Redeem One Person is to Redeem the World
Author: Gail A. Hornstein
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
Total Pages: 530
Release: 2005-09-17
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1590511832

A fascinating and dramatic account of a controversial figure in twentieth-century psychiatry. In this “dazzling and provocative”* biography, Gail Hornstein brings back to life the maverick psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. To Redeem One Person Is to Redeem the World tells the extraordinary life story of the German-Jewish refugee analyst who accomplished what Freud and almost everyone else thought impossible: she successfully treated schizophrenics and other seriously disturbed mental patients with intensive psychotherapy, rather than medication, lobotomy, or shock treatment. Written with unprecedented access to a rich archive of clinical materials and newly discovered records and documents from across Europe and the United States, Hornstein’s meticulous and “delightfully lucid”** biography definitively reclaims the life of Fromm-Reichmann. The therapist at the core of Joanne Greenberg’s I Never Promised You a Rose Garden is also the analyst who had an affair with, and later married, her patient Erich Fromm. A pioneer in her field, she made history as the pivotal figure of the unique and legendary mental hospital, Chestnut Lodge. “A lively, well-written account of a charismatic leader in an important period of psychiatry’s history.” —Psychology Today “At a time when little pills are seen as a quick fix for almost everything, this book is well worth taking time to read and contemplate.” —Philadelphia Inquirer *Publishers Weekly **Kirkus Reviews

Stalking Irish Madness

Stalking Irish Madness
Author: Patrick Tracey
Publisher: Bantam
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2008-08-26
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0553905597

In this powerful, sometimes harrowing, deeply felt story, Patrick Tracey journeys to Ireland to track the origin and solve the mystery of his Irish-American family's multigenerational struggle with schizophrenia. For most Irish Americans, a trip to Ireland is often an occasion to revisit their family's roots. But for Patrick Tracey, the lure of his ancestral home is a much more powerful need: part pilgrimage, part investigation to confront the genealogical mystery of schizophrenia–a disease that had claimed a great-great-great-grandmother, a grandmother, an uncle, and, most recently, two sisters. As long as Tracey could remember, schizophrenia ran on his mother's side, seldom spoken of outright but impossible to ignore. Devastated by the emotional toll the disease had already taken on his family, terrified of passing it on to any children he might have, and inspired by the recent discovery of the first genetic link to schizophrenia, Tracey followed his genealogical trail from Boston to Ireland's county Roscommon, home of his oldest-known schizophrenic ancestor. In a renovated camper, Tracey crossed the Emerald Isle to investigate the country that, until the 1960s, had the world's highest rate of institutionalization for mental illness, following clues and separating fact from fiction in the legendary relationship the Irish have had with madness. Tracey's path leads from fairy mounds and ancient caverns still shrouded in superstition to old pubs whose colorful inhabitants are a treasure trove of local lore. He visits the massive and grim asylum where his famine starved ancestors may have lived. And he interviews the Irish research team that first cracked the schizophrenic code to learn how much–and how little–we know about this often misunderstood disease. Filled with history, science, and lore, Stalking Irish Madness is an unforgettable chronicle of one man's attempt to make sense of his family's past and to find hope for the future of schizophrenic patients. From the Hardcover edition.

Divided Minds

Divided Minds
Author: Pamela Spiro Wagner
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2006-08-08
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780312320652

Relates the stories of a pair of identical twin sisters, a schizophrenic and a psychiatrist, in an account that traces the deterioration of the favored sister into mental illness, and the other's emergence from her troubled sibling's shadow.

Memoirs of My Nervous Illness

Memoirs of My Nervous Illness
Author: Daniel Paul Schreber
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 492
Release: 2000-01-31
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780940322202

In 1884, the distinguished German jurist Daniel Paul Schreber suffered the first of a series of mental collapses that would afflict him for the rest of his life. In his madness, the world was revealed to him as an enormous architecture of nerves, dominated by a predatory God. It became clear to Schreber that his personal crisis was implicated in what he called a "crisis in God's realm," one that had transformed the rest of humanity into a race of fantasms. There was only one remedy; as his doctor noted: Schreber "considered himself chosen to redeem the world, and to restore to it the lost state of Blessedness. This, however, he could only do by first being transformed from a man into a woman...."

Brain on Fire

Brain on Fire
Author: Susannah Cahalan
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2012-11-13
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1451621396

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING CHLOË GRACE MORETZ A “captivating” (The New York Times Book Review), award-winning memoir and instant New York Times bestseller that goes far beyond its riveting medical mystery, Brain on Fire is a powerful account of one woman’s struggle to recapture her identity. When twenty-four-year-old Susannah Cahalan woke up alone in a hospital room, strapped to her bed and unable to move or speak, she had no memory of how she’d gotten there. Days earlier, she had been on the threshold of a new, adult life: at the beginning of her first serious relationship and a promising career at a major New York newspaper. Now she was labeled as violent, psychotic, a flight risk. What happened? In an “unforgettable” (Elle), “stunningly brave” (NPR), and breathtaking narrative, Susannah tells the astonishing true story of her descent into madness, her family’s inspiring faith in her, and the lifesaving diagnosis that almost didn’t happen. “A fascinating look at the disease that…could have cost this vibrant, vital young woman her life” (People), Brain on Fire is an unforgettable exploration of memory and identity, faith and love, and a profoundly compelling tale of survival and perseverance.

The Sublime Object of Psychiatry

The Sublime Object of Psychiatry
Author: Angela Woods
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2011-08-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0199583951

Schizophrenia has been one of psychiatry's most contested diagnostic categories. The Sublime object of Psychiatry studies representations of schizophrenia across a wide range of disciplines and discourses: biological and phenomenological psychiatry, psychoanalysis, critical psychology, antipsychiatry, and postmodern philosophy.

Empowering Settings and Voices for Social Change

Empowering Settings and Voices for Social Change
Author: Mark S. Aber
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2010-11-17
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0199701482

Empowering Settings and Voices for Social Change combines a focus on understanding social settings as loci for empowering intervention with a focus on understanding and giving voice to citizens. Volume chapters illuminate advances in theory and method relevant to changing a broad spectrum of social settings from a strengths-based perspective.