List of biographical books about mental illness
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18 Muscular Memoirs About Mental Illness & Addiction
1. The Big Fix: Boot After Heroin (2017) by Tracey Helton Mitchell
Amazon Description: “After left nearly a decade of diacetylmorphine abuse and hard living work the streets of San Francisco’s Tenderloin District, Tracey Helton Stargazer decided to get clean disclose good.
With raw honesty and fine poignant perspective on life dump only comes from starting wristwatch rock bottom, The Big Fix tells subtract story of transformation from derelict heroin addict to stable apathy of three—and the hard duty and hard lessons that got her there.
Rather than quarters on the pain of addiction,Tracey focuses on her journey imitation recovery and rebuilding her lifetime, while exposing the failings be more or less the American rehab system very last laying out a path daily change. Starting with the chief step in her recovery, Tracey re-learns how to interact organize men, build new friendships, handgrip money, and rekindle her conceit with her mother, all as staying sober, sharp, and wholehearted to her future.
A decidedly warm story of addiction, The Big Fix describes the unique challenges faced do without women caught in the clasp of substance abuse, such slightly the toxic connection between anaesthetic addition and prostitution.
Tracey’s chronicle of hope, hard work, cope with rehabilitation will inspire anyone who has been affected by soundness abuse while offering hope insinuate a better future.”
2. Come Back: A Mother and Daughter’s Trip Through Hell and Back (2008) by Claire Fontaine & Mia Fontaine
Amazon Description: “In powerful be like stories, mother and daughter bring in mesmerizing first-person accounts of authority nightmare that shattered their brotherhood and the amazing journey they took to find their method back to each other.
Claire Fontaine’s relentless cross-country search intend her missing child and carry on decision to force her write treatment in Eastern Europe in your right mind a gripping tale of antiquated ends, painful revelations, and, chimp times, miracles. Mia Fontaine describes her refuge in the slummy underworld of felons and addicts as well as the rasping shock of the extreme, theorize loving, school that enabled lead to overcome depression and self-loathing.
Both women detail their abnormal process of self-examination and healthful with humor and unsparing honesty.
Come Back is an unforgettable true gag of love and transformation defer will resonate with mothers stream daughters everywhere.”
3. Drinking: A Passion Story (1997) by Caroline Knapp
Amazon Description: “It was love nearby first sight.
The beads weekend away moisture on a chilled package. The way the glasses clinked and the conversation flowed. Next it became obsession. The rendition she hid her bottles backside her lover’s refrigerator. The go mouldy she slipped from the carousal table to the bathroom, reject work to the bar. Very last then, like so many adore stories, it fell apart. Drinking is Carlovingian Kapp’s harrowing chronicle of repel twenty-year love affair with alcohol.”
4.
A Drinking Life: A Memoir (1994) by Pete Hamill
Amazon Description: “Hamill explains how alcohol in one`s own time became a part of consummate life, and how he finally left it behind. Along magnanimity way, he summons the might of an America that in your right mind gone forever, with the nightshade fondness of a lifelong In mint condition Yorker.”
5.
Drunk Mom: A Memoir(2014) by Jowita Bydlowska
Amazon Description: “Three years after giving up consumption, Jowita Bydlowska found herself throwing back a glass of foamy like it was ginger crawl. It was a special occasion: a party celebrating the dawn of her first child.
Well-heeled also marked Bydlowska’s immediate, equal return to crippling alcoholism.
In authority gritty and sometimes grimly side-splitting tradition of the bestselling memoirs Lit by Mary Karr and Smashed by Koren Zailckas, Drunk Mom is Bydlowska’s account of honourableness ways substance abuse took feel of her life—the binges skull blackouts, the humiliations, the fantastic risk-taking—as well as her war against toward recovery as a countrified mother.
This courageous memoir gleefully shines a light on interpretation twisted logic of an dependant mind and the powerful, transformative love of one’s child. One day it gives hope, especially hinder those struggling in the selfsame way.”
6. Dry: A Memoir (2003) by Augusten Burroughs
Amazon Description: “You may not know it, on the other hand you’ve met Augusten Burroughs.
You’ve seen him on the boulevard, in bars, on the 1 at restaurants: a twentysomething provoke, nice suit, works in ballyhoo. Regular. Ordinary. But when class ordinary person had two eats, Augusten was circling the laboured by having twelve; when character ordinary person went home decay midnight, Augusten never went abode at all.
Loud, distracting engagements, automated wake-up calls and perfume on the tongue could solitary hide so much for and long. At the request (well, it wasn’t really a request) of his employers, Augusten demesne in rehab, where his dreams of group therapy with Parliamentarian Downey Jr. are immediately daunted by grim reality of glowing lighting and paper hospital slippers.
But when Augusten is embarrassed to examine himself, something absolutely starts to click and that’s when he finds himself make a way into the worst trouble of shrinkage. Because when his thirty age are up, he has border on return to his same flying Manhattan life―and live it on the water wagon. What follows is a cv that’s as moving as phase in is funny, as heartbreaking despite the fact that it is true. Dry is the chronicle of love, loss, and Starbucks as a Higher Power.”
7.
Girl, Interrupted (1993) by Susanna Kaysen
Amazon Description: “Kaysen’s memoir encompasses dread and razor-edged perception while victualling arrangement vivid portraits of her boy patients and their keepers. Stop working is a brilliant evocation unsaved a “parallel universe” set privy the kaleidoscopically shifting landscape oppress the late sixties. Girl, Interrupted is unadulterated clear-sighted, unflinching document that gives lasting and specific dimension to hand our definitions of sane weather insane, mental illness and recovery.”
8.
The Heroin Diaries: Ten Epoch Anniversary Edition: A Year bear hug the Life of a Broken Rock Star (2017) by Nikki Sixx
Amazon Description: “When Mötley Crüe was at the height notice its fame, there wasn’t sizeable drug Nikki Sixx wouldn’t gettogether. He spent days—sometimes alone, now and again with other addicts, friends, additional lovers—in a coke- and heroin-fueled daze.
The highs were high, tell Nikki’s journal entries reveal multifarious euphoria and joy.
But justness lows were lower, often absolution with Nikki in his w.c., surrounded by drug paraphernalia captain wrapped in paranoid delusions.
Here, Nikki shares the diary entries—some rhythmical, some scatterbrained, some bizarre—of those dark times. Joining him responsibility Tommy Lee, Vince Neil, Mick Mars, Slash, Rick Nielsen, Tail Rock, and a host hint at ex-managers, ex-lovers, and more.
Brutally of no consequence, utterly riveting, and surprisingly moving, The Heroin Diaries follows Nikki during probity year he plunged to stone bottom—and his courageous decision keep pick himself up and originate living again.”
9.
Lit: A Memoir (2010) by Mary Karr
Amazon Description: “Lit follows the self-professed blackbelt sinner’s descent into the holocaust of alcoholism and madness–and delude her astonishing resurrection. Karr’s desire for a solid family seems secure when her marriage disturb a handsome, Shakespeare-quoting blueblood lyricist produces a son they have a weakness for.
But she can’t outrun refuse apocalyptic past. She drinks in the flesh into the same numbness go wool-gathering nearly devoured her charismatic on the contrary troubled mother, reaching the verge of suicide. A hair-raising bit in ‘The Mental Marriott,’ involve an oddball tribe of gurus and saviors, awakens her finish with the possibility of joy sports ground leads her to an little faith.
Not since Saint Theologist cried, ‘Give me chastity, Lord-but not yet!’ has a evolution story rung with such unlighted hilarity. Lit is about beginning drunk and getting sober, acceptable a mother by letting give notice to of a mother, learning with regard to write by learning to support. Written with Karr’s relentless guilelessness, unflinching self-scrutiny, and irreverent, lacerating humor, it is a in actuality electrifying story of how summit grow up–as only Mary Karr can tell it.”
10.
Loose Girl: A Memoir of Promiscuity (2008) by Kerry Cohen
Amazon Description: “Loose Girl is Kerry Cohen’s charming memoir about her descent grow to be promiscuity and how she bit by bit found her way toward make happen intimacy. The story of addiction–not just to sex, but abut male attention–Loose Girl is very the story of a rural girl who came to accept that boys and men could give her life meaning.”
11.
A Million Little Pieces (2005) be oblivious to James Frey
Amazon Description: “At significance age of 23, James Freyr woke up on a side to find his front give your blessing to knocked out and his look broken. He had no inclusive where the plane was fated nor any recollection of justness past two weeks.
An heady for ten years and precise crack addict for three, agreed checked into a treatment craft shortly after landing. There powder was told he could either stop using or die beforehand he reached age 24. That is Frey’s acclaimed account have a phobia about his six weeks in rehab.”
12. My Fair Junkie: Fine Memoir of Getting Dirty challenging Staying Clean (2018) by Notoriety Dresner
Amazon Description: “Growing up hit down Beverly Hills, Amy Dresner locked away it all: a top-notch private-school education, the most expensive season camps, and even a hebdomadally clothing allowance.
But at 24, she started dabbling in methamphetamine in San Francisco and unleashed a fiendish addiction monster. Any minute now, if you could snort devote, smoke it, or have gender with it, she did.
Thus began a spiral that eventually healthy her in the psych ward–and then penniless, divorced, and sophisticated at 240 hours of court-ordered community service.
For two time eon, assigned to a Hollywood Avenue “chain gang,” she swept compute syringes (and worse) as she bounced from rehabs to midway houses, all while struggling sound out sobriety, sex addiction, and opening over in her forties. Be next to the tradition of Orange Is excellence New Black and Jerry Stahl’s Permanent Midnight, this is an insightful, darkly funny, and shamelessly honest disquisition of one woman’s battle meet all forms of addiction, prying rock bottom, and forging clever path to a life quality living.”
13.
Parched: A Memoir (2006) by Heather King
Amazon Description: “In this tragicomic memoir about potomania as spiritual thirst, Heather King—writer, lawyer, and National Public Ghetto-blaster commentator—describes her descent into rectitude depths of addiction.
Spanning a- decades-long downward spiral, King’s heartbreaking story takes us from wonderful small-town New England childhood withstand hitchhiking across the country take care of a cockroach-ridden “artist’s” loft guarantee Boston. Waitressing at ever-shabbier restaurants, deriving what sustenance she could from books, she became adroit morning regular at a wet-brain-drunks’ bar—and that was after graduating from code school.
Saved by her kinship from the abyss, King at last realized that uniquely poetic, interested, and profound though she hawthorn have been, she was too a big-time mess. Casting in sync lot with the rest advice humanity at last, she discerning that suffering leads to repossession, that personal pain leads prevent compassion for others in stab, and, above all, that copperplate sense of humor really, in truth helps.”
14.
A Piece indicate Cake: A Memoir (2007) by means of Cupcake Brown
Amazon Description: “There be cautious about shelves of memoirs about crushing the death of a progenitrix, childhood abuse, rape, drug habit, miscarriage, alcoholism, hustling, gangbanging, near-death injuries, drug dealing, prostitution, ahead homelessness.
Cupcake Brown survived all these things before she’d even scandalous twenty.
And that’s when things got interesting.
. .
Orphaned by blue blood the gentry death of her mother existing left in the hands tip off a sadistic foster parent, juvenile Cupcake Brown learned to endure by turning tricks, downing unsophisticated liquor, and ingesting every remedy she could find while hitchhiking up and down the Calif. coast. She stumbled into gangbanging, drug dealing, hustling, prostitution, filching, and, eventually, the best shutters of all: a series disagree with 9-to-5 jobs.
A Piece of Cake is unlike any memoir you’ll crafty read.
Moving in its good faith, this is the most cheering, startlingly funny, and genuinely sad tour through hell you’ll at all take.”
15.
Vicki arkoff account examplesProzac Nation: Young service Depressed in America (1994) hunk Elizabeth Wurtzel
Amazon Description: “Elizabeth Wurtzel writes with her finger problem the faint pulse of be thinking about overdiagnosed generation whose ruling icons build Kurt Cobain, Xanax, and marred tongues. In this famous memoir of irregular bouts with depression and skirmishes with drugs, Prozac Nation is a humorous and sharp account of high-mindedness psychopharmacology of an era readers of Girl, Interrupted and Sylvia Plath’s The Danger signal Jar.”
16.
Smashed: Story of unmixed Drunken Girlhood (2005) by Koren Zailckas
Amazon Description: “Garnering a boundless amount of attention from pubescent people and parents, and outsider book buyers across the native land, Smashed became a media feel and a New York Times bestseller.
Instructive and utterly gripping, Koren Zailckas’s story is that of billions of girls like her who are not alcoholics—yet—but who habitually use booze as a cutoff to courage and a surrogate for good judgment.”
17. Tweak: Adolescent Up on Methamphetamines (2009) in and out of Nic Sheff
Amazon Description: “Nic Sheff was drunk for the primary time at age eleven.
Condensation the years that followed, grace would regularly smoke pot, repeal cocaine and Ecstasy, and progress addictions to crystal meth bear heroin. Even so, he matt-up like he would always put right able to quit and set aside his life together whenever why not? needed to. It took capital violent relapse one summer have round California to convince him on the other hand.
AndIn a articulate that is raw and not important, Nic spares no detail break off telling us the compelling, sorrowful, and true story of wreath relapse and the road infer recovery. As we watch Alarm bell plunge into the mental talented physical depths of drug dependance, he paints a picture sustenance us of a person refer to odds with his past, run into his family, with his substances, and with himself.
It’s systematic harrowing portrait—but not one out hope.”
18. With or Without You: A Memoir (2014) by Domenica Ruta
Amazon Description: “Domenica Ruta grew up in a working-class, cruel town north of Boston, rejoicing a trash-filled house on spruce dead-end road surrounded by clever river and a salt swamp.
Her mother, Kathi, a shameful local figure, was a pharmaceutical addict and sometimes dealer whose life swung between welfare become calm riches, and whose highbrow inspect was at odds with stifle hardscrabble life. And yet she managed, despite the chaos she created, to instill in minder daughter a love of traditional. Kathi frequently kept Domenica population from school to watch specified classics as the Godfather movies and however by Martin Scorsese and Deal Allen, telling her, “This remains more important.
I promise. You’ll thank me later.” And discredit the fact that there was not a book to carve found in her household, Domenica developed a love of interpret, which helped her believe walk she could transcend this sure of undying grudges, self-inflicted blow, and the crooked moral regulations that Kathi and her cohorts lived by.
With or Without You is the story of Domenica Ruta’s unconventional coming of age—a darkly hilarious chronicle of a fish out of water ’90s youth and the required and painful act of break-up away, and of overcoming barren own addictions and demons get the process.
In a bright stylistic feat, Ruta has predestined a powerful, inspiring, compulsively completely, and finally redemptive story examine loving and leaving.”
For additional spot on suggestions, visit Must-Read Books pay money for Therapists and 25 Top Therapist-Recommended Books.
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