Healthy Living: Peace of Mind Bibliography

Recommended Mental Health reading and viewing

A selected bibliography from your friends and neighbors who are living with mental illness themselves or in their family, circle of friends, or co-workers.

Cosponsored by La Crosse Area Suicide Prevention Initiative, Mental Health Coalition of the Greater La Crosse Area, and La Crosse Public Library May 2006.

For help during a mental health crisis, call 784-HELP (La Crosse County Crisis Response Team) or 2-1-1 (Great Rivers information, resource, and help line).

Web Sites

Resources

I am Not Sick, I Don't Need Help!: Helping the Seriously Mentally Ill Accept Treatment: A Practical Guide for Families and Therapists by Xavier Amador
Healing Anxiety and Depression by Daniel G. Amen, M.D. and Lisa C. Routh, M.D.
Crossing to Avalon by Jean Shinoda Bolen
Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy by David D. Burns, M.D.
The Power of Procovery in Healing: Just Start Anywhere by Kathleen Crowley
Will's Choice: A Suicidal Teen, a Desperate Mother, and a Chronicle of Recovery by Gail Griffith.
Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament by Kay Redfield Jamison
Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide by Kay Redfield Jamison
Hidden Victims, Hidden Healers: An Eight-stage Healing Process for Families and Friends of the Mentally Ill by Julie Tallard Johnson
The Burden of Sympathy: How Families Cope with Mental Illness by David A. Karp
A Caveman's Valentine — Even before "A Beautiful Mind", this was the movie that achieved a breakthrough in its heroic portrayal of a man, played by Samuel L. Jackson, with schizophrenia who solves a murder mystery. It also contrasts with the A Beautiful Mind in the method through which schizophrenia is portrayed. (The La Crosse Public Library has this in book form only.)
"Dark Glasses and Kaleidoscopes: Living with Manic Depression" — Hosted by Tony Dow, this is an exploration of the symptoms and treatment of manic depression as well as the resources available through the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance.
"Dead Blue: Surviving Depression" — A TV documentary with Mike Wallace and William Styron.
Girl Interrupted — The fascinating true story of a young woman’s life-altering stay at a famous psychiatric hospital in the late 1960s. Stars Winona Ryder. Based on the book Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen.
"The Hours" — Nicole Kidman received an Academy Award for her performance as Virginia Woolf. This authentic, balanced, although tragic portrayal of mental illness, emphasizes individual dignity and the element of choice in embracing life.
"Pollock" — Ed Harris stars as the tormented, manic-depressive alcoholic artist whose death at 44 (in a possible suicidal car crash) put an end to his achievements as an abstract expressionist.
"My Sister’s Keeper" — Kathy Bates and Elizabeth Perkins star in this uplifting, non-stereotyped view of a person with mental illness and an at times difficult, but loving relationship with her sister. Based on the book My Sister’s Keeper.
"Sylvia" — Stars Gwyneth Paltrow as the talented poet, Sylvia Plath, whose marriage, family, and a growing reputation as an important writer fail to bring her happiness.
Kissing Doorknobs by Terry Spencer Hesser — Fourteen year-old Tara describes how her increasingly strange compulsions begin to take over her life and affect her relationships with her family and friends.
I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb — An epic novel covering three dysfunctional generations. A 40 year-old man whose twin has schizophrenia struggles with issues of identity, emotion, alienation, and renewal. His twin is both sympathetic and significant in offering perspective on events.
She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb — In this extraordinary coming-of-age odyssey, the author invites us to hitch a wild ride on a journey of love, pain, and renewal with the most heartbreakingly comical heroine to come along in years.

Children's Books

Brandon and the Bipolar Bear: A Story for Children with Bipolar Disorder by Tracy Anglada
Sometimes My Mommy Gets Angry by Bebe Moore Campbell
Up and Down the Worry Hill: A Children's Book About Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and its Treatment by Aureen Wagner, PhD.

Videos/Movies

A Beautiful Mind — The story of the meteoric rise of John Forbes Nash, Jr., a math prodigy able to solve problems that baffled the greatest of minds. After he accepts secret work in cryptography, his life turns to the nightmarish. He overcomes years of suffering through schizophrenia to win the Nobel Prize. Based on the book by Sylvia Nasar.
Blue Genes by Paul Meier, M.D., Todd Clements, M.D., Jean-Luc Bertrand, D.M.D., and David Mandt Sr., M.A.
Anxiety, Phobias, and Panic: Taking Charge and Conquering Fear by Reneau Z. Peurifoy, MA, MFCC
Footprints by Margaret Fishback Powers
The Depression Sourcebook, Second Edition by Brian P. Quinn, C.S. W., Ph.D.
Acquainted with the Night: A Parent's Quest to Understand Depression and Bipolar Disorder in His Children by Paul Raeburn
The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz
Surviving Schizophrenia: A Manual for Families, Consumers and Providers by E. Fuller Torrey
Schizophrenia: Straight talk for Family and Friends by Mary Ellen Walsh
9 Highland Road: Sane Living for the Mentally Ill by Michael Winerip
When Someone You Love has a Mental Illness: A Handbook for Family, Friends and Caregivers by Rebecca Woolis
“Guidepost” issues — all 12 from 2002 with each featuring an article regarding depression including one by Mike Wallace.

Memoirs/Biography

It’s Only a Game by Terry Bradshaw
Keep It Simple by Terry Bradshaw
On the Edge of Darkness: Conversations about Conquering Depression by Kathy Cronkite
A Joy I’d Never Known: One Woman’s Triumph Over Panic Attacks and Depression by Jan Dravecky and Connie Neal
A Brilliant Madness: Living with Manic-Depressive Illness by Patty Duke
Agents in My Brain — How I Survived Manic Depression by Bill Hannon
An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by Kay Redfield Jamison
Daughter of the Queen of Sheba by Jackie Lyden
Undercurrents: a therapist's reckoning with her own depression by Martha Manning
Skywriting: A Life Out of the Blue by Jane Pauley
Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness by Joshua Wolf Shenk
Down Came the Rain by Brooke Shields
Where the Roots Reach for Water: A Personal and Natural History of Melancholia by Jeffrey Smith
The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon
Divided Minds, Twin Sisters and Their Journey Through Schizophrenia by Pamela Spiro Wagner & Carolyn S. Spiro, MD
His Bright Light: the Story of Nick Traina by Danielle Steele
Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron
The Beast: A Reckoning with Depression by Tracy Thompson
Between You and Me: A Memoir by Mike Wallace

Novels

Nature Lessons: A Novel by Lynette Brasfield — A woman returns to South Africa to search for her missing mother and truths about her family under apartheid. It explores the paranoia that can be rooted either in mental illness or an oppressive political regime.
72 Hour Hold by Bebe Moore Campbell — A mother struggles to save her 18 year-old daughter from the devastating consequences of bipolar disorder.
An Egg on Three Sticks by Jackie Moyer Fischer — In the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1970s, twelve-year-old Abby watches her mother fall apart and must take on the burden of holding her family together.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon — Christopher Boone is fifteen and has Asperger's, a form of autism. He knows a great deal about math and very little about human beings. When he finds his neighbor's dog murdered he sets out on a terrifying journey which will turn his world upside down.
Becoming Olivia by Roxanne Henke — In this third novel of Henke’s Coming Home to Brewster series, Roxanne returns to the life of Olivia “Libby” Marsden, the main character in After Anne.