"It's 1927 and eighteen-year-old Mary Engle is hired to work as a secretary at a remote but scenic institution for mentally disabled women called the Nettleton State Village for Feebleminded Women of Childbearing Age. She's immediately in awe of her employer -- brilliant, genteel Dr. Agnes Vogel. Dr. Vogel had been the only woman in her class in medical school. As a young psychiatrist she was an outspoken crusader for women's suffrage. Now, at age...

"The best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Road returns with the second volume of The Passenger series: Stella Maris is an intimate portrait of grief and longing, as a young woman in a psychiatric facility seeks to understand her own existence. 1972, Black River Falls, Wisconsin: Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University...

"Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman's coming of age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of post traumatic stress disorder and bipolar II disorder; Terese Marie Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. The triumphant result is Heart Berries, a memorial for...

"Jaquira Díaz writes an unflinching account of growing up as a queer biracial girl searching for home as her family splits apart and her mother struggles with mental illness and addiction. From her own struggles with depression and drug abuse to her experiences of violence to Puerto Rico's history of colonialism, every page vibrates with music and lyricism"-- "In this searing memoir, Jaquira Díaz writes fiercely and eloquently of her challenging...

"Katrina Kim may be broke, the black sheep of her family, and slightly unhinged, but she isn't a stalker. Her obsession with her co-worker, Kurt, is just one of many coping mechanisms-like her constant shape and number rituals, or the way scenes from her favorite children's book bleed into her vision whenever she feels anxious or stressed. But when Katrina finds a cryptic message from Kurt that implies he's aware of her surveillance, her tenuous hold...

At the opening of My Happy Life, the unnamed narrator of this bittersweet fictional memoir has been abandoned in a locked room of a defunct hospital for the mentally ill. She hasn't seen the nice man who brings her food in days; she's eaten the soap and the toothpaste; she tried to eat the plaster on her walls, a dietary adventure that ended none too well. And yet, curiously, the narrator is happy. Despite a lifetime of neglect, physical abuse, and...

"Award-winning Asian British comedy writer Amanda Rosenberg presents an intimate memoir of confessional essays about the hilarious, inappropriate, and often difficult side to being mental"--

When she has a nervous breakdown in front of an audience of millions, broadcast journalist Isabel Murphy is sent to recover at Three Breezes, a renowned psychiatric hospital, where, by facing the reality of her situation, she must pick up the pieces of her shattered life.

Enlightened centers on Amy Jellicoe, a 40-year-old woman who returns home to California after a month's stay at a holistic treatment facility, a result of having a mental breakdown at work triggered by her self-destructive ways. Amy returns to her old life with a new cultivated approach and perspective, which includes daily meditation and exhorting the power of self-help and inner healing.

The 'black sheep' son of a wealthy family meets a young psychiatric patient who's been raised in isolation her entire life. He takes the naive young woman home for his brother's wedding to convince his family that he's finally straightened out his life. She impresses his prim and proper family with her genuine (if unstable) charm, and along the way they fall into improbable love.