Personal Stories Articles

Listed by most recent articles first.

• Brave Girl Eating: A Family’s Struggle with Anorexia
  Between three and six percent of all teens struggle with some type of eating disorder, be it bulimia, binge eating, or anorexia. Because these illnesses involve eating, they seem to take a blow at family ...
• A Cluttered Life: Searching for God, Serenity, and My Missing Keys
  A Cluttered Life: Searching for God, Serenity, and My Missing Keys is written for anyone who has felt the pull between the chaos of everyday living and the longing for a rich spiritual life.  Pesi ...
• Fat People
  For his book Fat People, Bill Schubart has created and gathered a collection of stories that will make you rethink your relationship with food. Schubart is smart, sensitive and unnervingly keen at noticing details.  The ...
• Length of Stay for Residential OCD Treatment
  Toward the end of his freshman year of college, my son Dan’s obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) was so severe that he ...
• Therapists Spill: The Best Advice I’ve Received On Conducting Therapy
  There are certain words of wisdom that stay with you the rest of your life -- especially ...
• You Should Be So Lucky: Dealing with Tragedy
  Katy was diagnosed with a meningioma, a rare operable brain tumor occurring in about 7 in 100,000 people. The ...
• OCD and ADHD: Is There a Connection?
  By the end of his freshman year in college, my son Dan’s obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) was so severe that he ...
• Demons in the Age of Light: A Memoir of Psychosis and Recovery
  From the very first paragraph of Whitney Robinson's first book, Demons in the Age of Light: A Memoir of Psychosis and Recovery, her way with words is not only apparent, but glaringly so.  Reading further, ...
• A Counselor’s Clients Can Make the Best Teachers
  From a reasonably young age, I knew exactly what I wanted to be -- a professional helper. I ...
• Restoring Our Bodies, Reclaiming Our Lives: Recovery from Eating Disorders
  Aimee Liu writes with a gentleness and an understanding that only someone who has been through the painful process of recovery can truly possess: Her 1979 memoir, Solitaire, was the first discussion of anorexia nervosa ...
• From Suicidal To Being in Awe of Life
  I’m 28 years old and for the last four years I haven’t had one suicidal thought or intention because ...
• The Boy from Bothell: Bipolar Vietnam Veteran
  Gene Olson’s The Boy from Bothell: Bipolar Vietnam Veteran gives a memoir of his life, his difficulties with bipolar disorder and his fight for sanity.  As Olson notes, bipolar disorder was first described at the ...
• Sleeping With Gods
  The subject of mental illness has often been explored in works of literature and other media. Michael Fontana’s novel Sleeping With Gods aims to combine a coming-of-age love story with themes of mental health. In ...
• Cry Depression, Celebrate Recovery: My Journey through Mental Illness
  Barbara Altman, a St. Louis, Mo., native, earned her Bachelor of Music degree at Fontbonne University and taught music therapy at St. Louis Institute of Music.  She now teaches piano and guitar in her home ...
• The Sibling Effect: What the Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal About Us
  I am what science calls a singleton. And according to G. Stanley Hall, a psychologist, professor and the first president of the American Psychological Association, I am without a doubt narcissistic, spoiled and a bumbling ...
• Runaway Mind: My Own Race with Bipolar Disorder
  Runaway Mind by Maggie Reese was a thoroughly enjoyable, engaging and educational book filled with firsthand accounts of what life can be like with bipolar disorder.  Maggie invites us into her life during this very ...
• Life Gets Better: The Unexpected Pleasures of Growing Older
  In the film Gigi, Maurice Chevalier sings about the advantages of aging in the song titled "I’m glad I’m not young anymore."  Wendy Lustbader would agree with him.  As she puts it in this book, ...
• Understanding Recovery Avoidance in OCD
  Dan would sit in a chair for hours, “stuck” and unable to move. He couldn’t eat, socialize, or enter most buildings. My ...
• Resilience: How Your Inner Strength Can Set You Free from the Past
  Boris Cyrulnik is a renowned neuropsychiatrist and psychoanalyst, director of teaching at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the Université du Sud, Toulon-Var, France. At the age of 5, he lost both of ...
• Silent Voices
  The book Silent Voices is an intriguing story about how a family dealt with mental illness and how a lack of support from professionals caused a family to endure tragedy that changed their lives forever. ...
• Surviving Depression: My Agonizing Struggle with Sanity
  Robert L. Hamlett’s Surviving Depression offers a window into the life of a man to whom many people can relate.  His style may not be as eloquent as some, but Hamlett does get his point ...
• The Long Goodbye
  In her book, The Long Goodbye, Meghan O’Rourke explores the fifteen months following her mother’s death. In a culture that has few traditions and rituals for mourning, O’Rourke longs for something, anything, that will help ...
• Women Who Love Psychopaths
  This book has many reasons to recommend it. Two are most powerful. First, its postulation through neuroscientific indications that the psychopath's brain is genetically different from his fellows and so he cannot change is paramount ...
• Finally Out: Letting Go of Living Straight
  By all external indicators, Dr. Loren Olson was a success in life as a devoted husband and father who was making strides in his career as a psychiatrist.  At age 40, he was a mature ...
• History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life
  After reading History of a Suicide, written by Jill Bialosky, I was moved by the way the author not only shared her story of her sister's suicide, but also how committed she was to researching ...