"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. There was a script for a family like the Galvins--hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony--and they all tried to play their parts. But behind the closed doors of the house on Hidden Valley Road was a far different reality: psychological breakdown,...

From the earliest efforts to segregate the "mad" in society, to the wily World War II-era social engineers who twisted Darwin's "survival of the fittest" theory to fit a much darker agenda, to the follies of the antipsychiatry movement (starring L. Ron Hubbard and his gifted, insanity-denying compatriot Thomas Szasz), we've struggled to deal with mental health care for generations. And it all leads to the current landscape, in which too many families...

Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness characterized by incoherent or illogical thoughts, bizarre behaviour and speech, and delusions or hallucinations. Schizophrenia typically begins in young adulthood, and causes can be due to genetics, environment, and psychological and social processes. Delusions are beliefs that usually involve a misinterpretation of perceptions or experiences. Schizophrenia is a treatable illness, like many other types of...

Updated throughout and filled with all the latest research, treatment plans, commonly asked questions and more, the bestselling resource on schizophrenia is back-now in its seventh edition. E. Fuller Torrey is a brilliant writer. There is no one writing on psychology today whom I would rather read. - Los Angeles Times Since its first publication in 1983, Surviving Schizophrenia has become the standard reference book on the disease and has helped thousands...

"Schizophrenia is not a single unifying diagnosis, and Esmé Weijun Wang writes not just to her fellow members of the 'collected schizophrenias' but to those who wish to understand it as well. Opening with the journey toward her diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, Wang discusses the medical community's own disagreement about labels and procedures for diagnosing those with mental illness, and then follows an arc that examines the manifestations...

Struggling with schizophrenia, high-school senior Alex is used to being different, but when she unexpectedly falls for a boy and begins to experience the usual teen rites of passage, Alex isnt sure she is prepared for normal.

"In 1954, researchers at the newly formed National Institute of Mental Health set out to study the genetics of schizophrenia. When they got word that four 24-year-old identical quadruplets in Lansing, Michigan, had all been diagnosed with the mental illness, they could hardly believe their ears. Here was incontrovertible proof of hereditary transmission and, thus, a chance to bring international fame to their fledgling institution. The case of the...

Mark Vonnegut, son of legendary novelist Kurt Vonnegut, tells the story of his descent into severs schizophrenia, and his overcoming of the ailment to become a respected physician.

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...

An account of a father's fight to save his child from an extremely severe case of mental illness in the face of overwhelming adversity.