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Mental Health & Psychiatry

Honest books about mental illness and the families who live with it. Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon, a National Book Award winner, combines his own experience of depression with history, science and interviews. Robert Kolker's Hidden Valley Road tells the story of the Galvin family, six of whose twelve children were diagnosed with schizophrenia, and what they taught researchers. Jeannette Walls's memoir The Glass Castle shows a childhood shaped by a father's alcoholism. For readers, patients and families looking for understanding as much as information.

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Mental Health & Psychiatry

Depression & Mood Disorders

Books that help explain depression and mood disorders, for those who live with them and those who love them. Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, winner of the National Book Award, combines his own experience of severe depression with research, history, treatment and the stories of many other sufferers across cultures. It is honest about the illness and hopeful about recovery, and is widely regarded as one of the best books ever written on the subject. More books will join this category; see Mental Health & Psychiatry for more.

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Mental Health & Psychiatry

Addiction

Addiction harms not only the person who suffers from it but everyone who depends on them. Jeannette Walls's memoir The Glass Castle shows this from a child's point of view: a brilliant, charming father whose drinking keeps the family moving, hungry and in danger, and a mother who will not settle down. Walls writes without bitterness, and with love, about the parents she eventually left. A powerful and widely read book about growing up with a parent's addiction. More books will join this shelf; see Mental Health & Psychiatry for more.

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Hidden Valley Road

Inside the Mind of an American Family

By Robert Kolker

Robert Kolker’s narrative nonfiction account follows Don and Mimi Galvin and their twelve children, a Colorado family in which six of the ten sons were diagnosed with schizophrenia. The book examines how severe mental illness altered relationships within the household while exposing the other children to instability, secrecy, violence, abuse, and uneven burdens of care. Alongside this intimate history, Kolker traces changing explanations of schizophrenia—from theories that blamed family dynamics, especially mothers, to biological and genetic models that treated families such as the Galvins as vital research subjects. Their participation in psychiatric studies links private suffering to a much larger scientific effort. The result is both a family chronicle and a history of modern psychiatry, attentive to the distance between scientific promise and what patients and relatives experience in everyday life.

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