"...demonstrates the physical, psychological, and social harm resulting from the label schizophrenic and the continuous need to reexamine the underpinnings and attitudes of psychiatry." -Booklist "Of all the books written about schizophrenia...none is more comprehensive, accurate, thorough, and clearer in style and statement than John Modrow's classic How to Become a Schizophrenic. Modrow, who is a recovered schizophrenic and is, perhaps, the unrecognized and unappreciated world's foremost authority on this disorder, has performed a truly invaluable service and has made the major contribution to our understanding of the causes and cures of this pseudodisease." -Robert A Baker, Ph.D., former chairman of the Department of Psychology, University of Kentucky; author of They Call It Hypnosis, Hidden Memories: Voices and Visions from Within and Mind Games: Are We Obsessed with Therapy? "One of the best things I've read on the subject...I am struck by the richness of the ideas and the research and the soundness of the conclusions." -Peter Breggin, M.D., founder and director of the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology; author of Toxic Psychiatry and Talking Back to Prozac "...a very important contribution to the field." -Theodore Lidz, M.D., former chairman of the Department of Psychiatry, Yale University; author of The Origin and Treatment of Schizophrenic Disorders and Schizophrenia and the Family "...well researched and easily readable (a difficult combination to achieve)!" -Judi Chamberlin, author of On Our Own: Patient-Controlled Alternatives to the Mental Health System "...meticulously challenges all the major research that claims that schizophrenia is a biological disorder." -Ty C. Colbert, Ph.D., author of Broken Brains or Wounded Hearts: What Causes Mental Illness "Before reading the book, I was largely convinced that schizophrenia was primarily a brain disease. Modrow has forced me to take a second look, however, and reconsider the psychological causes of the condition." -The Vancouver Sun "...it is ennobling that despite bad and discouraging treatment he was able to understand himself and others, and share that acquired knowledge in an accurate and helpful way." -Bertram P. Karon, PhD., professor of clinical psychology, Michigan State University; author of Psychotherapy of Schizophrenia "...gives clear proof that there's real hope. Truly a remarkable book!" -Alan Caruba, Bookviews

Early in her life, Sandra started to exhibit the symptons of paranoid schizophrenia which came as a surprise to her unsuspecting family. Her book chronicles her struggles, hospitalisations, encounters with professionals, return to school, eventual marriage and success as an artist, writer, and advocate.

A powerful account of how cultural anxieties about race shaped American notions of mental illness The civil rights era is largely remembered as a time of sit-ins, boycotts, and riots. But a very different civil rights history evolved at the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Ionia, Michigan. In The Protest Psychosis, psychiatrist and cultural critic Jonathan Metzl tells the shocking story of how schizophrenia became the diagnostic term overwhelmingly applied to African American protesters at Ionia—for political reasons as well as clinical ones. Expertly sifting through a vast array of cultural documents, Metzl shows how associations between schizophrenia and blackness emerged during the tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s—and he provides a cautionary tale of how anxieties about race continue to impact doctor-patient interactions in our seemingly postracial America. This book was published with two different covers. Customers will be shipped the book with one of the two covers.

The word "CRAZY" could apply to anyone of us, at certain times in our lives. We are complicated beings.

#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.

First published in 2002. Schizophrenia: A Scientific Delusion?, first published in 1990, made a very significant contribution to the debates on the concepts of schizophrenia and mental illness. These concepts remain both influential and controversial and this new updated second edition provides an incisive critical analysis of the debates over the last decade. As well as providing updated versions of the historical and scientific arguments against the concept of schizophrenia which formed the basis of the first edition, Boyle covers significant new material relevant to today’s debates.

For ten years, Arnhild Lauveng suffered as a schizophrenic, going in and out of the hospital for months or even a year at a time. A Road Back from Schizophrenia gives extraordinary insight into the logic (and life) of a schizophrenic. Lauveng illuminates her loss of identity, her sense of being controlled from the outside, and her relationship to the voices she heard and her sometimes terrifying hallucinations. Painful recollections of moments of humiliation inflicted by thoughtless medical professionals are juxtaposed with Lauveng’s own understanding of how such patients are outwardly irrational and often violent. She paints a surreal world—sometimes full of terror and sometimes of beauty—in which “the Captain” rules her by the rod and the school’s corridors are filled with wolves. When she was diagnosed with the mental illness, it was emphasized that this was a congenital disease, and that she would have to live with it for the rest of her life. Today, however, she calls herself a “former schizophrenic,” has stopped taking medication for the illness, and currently works as a clinical psychologist. Lauveng, though sometimes critical of mental health care, ultimately attributes her slow journey back to health to the dedicated medical staff who took the time to talk to her and who saw her as a person simply diagnosed with an illness—not the illness incarnate. A powerful memoir for sufferers, their families, and the professionals who care for them.