"One day, Lori Gottlieb is a therapist who helps patients in her Los Angeles practice. The next, a crisis causes her world to come crashing down. Enter Wendell, the quirky but seasoned therapist in whose office she suddenly lands. With his balding head, cardigan, and khakis, he seems to have come straight from Therapist Central Casting. Yet he will turn out to be anything but. As Gottlieb explores the inner chambers of her patients' lives, she finds...

"The highly anticipated debut from the acclaimed award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv compels us to examine how the stories we tell about mental illness shape our sense of who we are"-- In Strangers to Ourselves, a powerful and gripping debut, Rachel Aviv raises fundamental questions about how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Aviv writes...

"A remarkable exploration of the therapeutic relationship, Dr. Mark Epstein reflects on one year's worth of therapy sessions during which he brought together his years of experience with Western psychotherapy and his equally long investigation into Buddhism to understand how the practices, in tandem, can lead to even greater awareness - for his patients, and for himself For years, Dr. Mark Epstein was careful not to let his spiritual leanings as a...

"We speak of doctors most often as heroes, martyrs, or victims. Drawing from forty years of experience working in an emergency psychiatric ward, Paolo Milone offers a more complex--and more compelling--picture. With prose at once direct and lyrical, he transports us inside Ward 77, where mental illness coexists with the ordinary lives of those who, at the end of their shifts, take their white coats off and have to remember to buy milk. In this unsettling,...

Presents the story of a young woman who struggles with cutting, one of society's most enigmatic and misunderstood disorders, revealing her most intimate thoughts and a range of other psychological problems. "On the outside, she appears to have it all. She's creative, beautiful, confident. But inside Victoria Leatham struggles with silent, secret, and unbearable pain. In her late teens, Leatham is struck with an undeniable urge to cut herself. Oddly,...

An actress and producer who suffered from crippling, undiagnosed depression in her teens recounts her harrowing experience of psychological manipulation and abuse at a "therapeutic" boarding school where every moment was a test of survival, and shares how she was able to heal in the aftermath.

"One of These Things First is a wry and poignant reminiscence of a 15 year old gay Jewish boy in Brooklyn in the early sixties, and his unexpected trajectory from a life behind a rack of dresses in his grandmothers bra and girdle store, to Manhattans fabled Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, a fashionable Charenton for wealthy neurotics and Ivy League alcoholics, whose famous alumni include writers, poets, madmen, Marilyn Monroe, and bestselling author...