When we chose the category book about mental health or illness, I don't think I really understood the potentially huge number of books that could count. This could include works of fiction, studies of individuals, academic books about mental health or illness from a variety of perspectives.
In other words, this list should not be considered exhaustive in any way. Pretty much any honest or reflective book about human experience could be considered a book about mental health or mental illness, though some will be more explicit through framing the subject in those terms. The books listed are the ones that I first thought of, as well as books suggested by other challenge members.
There are some obvious academic classics you could consider,
Freud may get a bad rap as a sexist, and wrong about everything, but his writing is actuallyinteresting and mostly accessible. Reading anything's he's written can provide you with an understanding of the history of psychiatry. His influence on our culture, regardless of how much psychiatry and psychology have changed, remains massive.
Another couple of classic works of theory aim to topple the empire of Freud. These are Foucault's History of Sexuality part one, which takes on Freud's "repression hypothesis" and the entire method of psychoanalysis, as well as Madness and Civilization, which identifies this binary as central to modernity.
Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipusis a major critique of the Freudian model of psychoanalysis that has also been influential in academia.
Another classic recommendation from a member of the group is Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth or Black Skin, White Masks
And with that, I've revisited a chunk of my time in graduate school in the mid-1990s.
(theme song for this entry "Where is My Mind?" by the Pixies)
There are also a number of recent academic books that I haven't read, but which are among those "highly anticipated" or duly celebrated award-winners:
Marr Jurelle Bruce, How to go Mad Without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity
Mab Segrest, Administrations of Lunacy: The Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum
Regina Kunzel, In the Shadow of Diagnosis: Psychiatric Power and Queer Life
Also recent, Adam Shatz's The Rebel's Clinic: the Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon is about Frantz Fanon's work and has been popular with members of the challenge.
When I checked in with members of the challenge facebook group, I got a variety of recommendations for books, including
Art therapist Sandra Magsamen and Ivy Ross's, Your Brain on Art: How Art Transforms Us.
Alicia Elliot's memoir, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground which connects mental health and illness to Mohawk experience and settler colonialism.
Susan Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted, a literary memoir about the experience of being locked in a mental institution in the late 1960s.
Alan Reeve's Notes from a Waiting Room, published in 1983, is a memoir chronicling the author's 17 years in the UK's Broadmoor mental institution, his eventual escape, and his engagement with radical politics.
Other memoirs that readers in the challenge have read include comedian, Fern Brady's Strong Female Character and novelist, Viet Thanh Nguyen's A Man with Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial. Both of these look fascinating to me. I really loved Nguyen's novel the Sympathizer, and had seen it was out, but didn't realize that the Man With Two Faces is a memoir. A couple of years ago, for a book club, I read Claire Vaye Watkins' I Love You, But I've Chosen Darkness which is about post-partum depression, among other things. I didn't love the book, but it did leave a lasting impression.
Kaysen's book got higher marks than Sylvia Plath's classic novel, The Bell Jar which one of our challengers read, but left non-plussed. I remember being very moved by it as a teenager in the 1980s, but I haven't read it since then, and today if you bop around the web, you will see people assailing it for its casual racism.
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