Personal Stories Articles
Listed by most recent articles first.
- 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 ...
- Crazy: Notes On and Off the Couch
Have you ever wondered what’s going through your therapist’s head? Or, if you are a mental health professional yourself, have you ever wondered if you were alone in your thoughts about your job? Whichever side ...
- The Long Goodbye: A Memoir
The Long Goodbye by poet and literary critic Meghan O’Rourke is a beautifully written and poignant memoir about grappling with a mother’s death.
In the first of three sections, O’Rourke recounts her mother's colon cancer ...
- Tiger Mother: Son of a Bitch
It is hard to summarize and review Tiger Mother: Son of a Bitch without an undercurrent of disgust, even when trying to temper it with pity. Derrick Lin’s self-published work, written in “a matter of ...
- Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading
In her memoir Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading, author Nina Sankovitch recounts the year she spent reading a book a day in hopes of soothing her grief. Sankovitch’s oldest sister, ...
- The Way of the Comedian
This article has been excerpted from Humor’s Hidden Power: Weapon, Shield and Psychological Salve by Nichole Force, M.A.
According to a tale in the ...
- Navigating College with Borderline Personality Disorder
I was recently diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) after spending two weeks in a mental hospital following two failed ...
- A Dog Named Slugger: How Service Dogs Improve the Lives of Many
Consider these surprising studies concerning the benefit of trained service dogs to help all kinds of ...
- Better By Mistake: The Unexpected Benefits of Being Wrong
Intellectually we know that making a mistake gives us the opportunity to learn and grow. Still, that usually does little to assuage our shame, embarrassment and guilt when making an error. Of course, it depends ...
- What I Wish I Knew in Grad School: Current and Former Students Share 16 Tips
Graduate school is both an incredibly challenging and rewarding time in ...
- The River of Forgetting
In this elegant and deceptively simple memoir by Jane Rowan, her River of Forgetting has filled a need within the context of healing from childhood sexual abuse. Most such books deal with specific, visual memories. ...
- Book Review: Mortal Bonds
Losing one parent is devastating. But losing both parents within 13 days of each other? In his eBook memoir, Mortal Bonds, John Tsilimparis recounts his parents’ difficult deaths, his father from various health conditions and ...
- Katherine Kitty Dukakis on ECT
Katherine Kitty Dukakis presented to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Neurological Devices Panel examining the reclassification of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) devices on January 27, 2011. These are her remarks as published in the public ...
- Donald Johnson on ECT
Donald Johnson presented to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Neurological Devices Panel examining the reclassification of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) devices on January 27, 2011. These are his remarks as published in the public ...
- Mary Rosedale on ECT
Mary Rosedale presented to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Neurological Devices Panel examining the reclassification of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) devices on January 27, 2011. These are her remarks as published in the public record ...
