Mental Health Memoirs — The Inside Account

Styron's account of his severe depression is still the best description of the disorder in literary form — not because it is scientific but because it renders the inside of it in language that non-sufferers can almost enter. The suicide attempt he does not make is described with more precision than most that are.

Jamison is one of the world's leading researchers on bipolar disorder and she has bipolar disorder. Her memoir of living inside the condition she studies professionally is the most illuminating account of mania and depression from both positions simultaneously. The suicide attempt is rendered without sentiment and without pride.

Saks is a law professor at USC and she has schizophrenia. Her memoir traces the diagnosis and the decades of managing it — the hospitalizations, the restraints, the medication regime, the refusal to be defined by it. The advocacy the book produced has changed how psychiatric patients are treated in California.

Haig had a panic attack at twenty-four and spent two years unable to leave the house, unable to see a future. This memoir is not a triumph narrative — he is still managing it. The list of reasons to stay alive at the end is the most honest inventory in recent memoir, because he includes the ones that are small.

Cahalan spent a month in a violent psychotic state that no one could diagnose. She wrote this memoir from medical records and her own fragmented memory — the self she was during that month is a stranger to her. The diagnosis, when it finally comes, is almost beside the point.

Gay was gang-raped at twelve and used her body as a protection strategy for the next thirty years — making herself big enough that men would not want her. Her memoir is the most honest account of the relationship between trauma and body that exists in contemporary nonfiction. The hunger is not the point; the reason for the hunger is.

Hornbacher wrote this at twenty-three, from inside the anorexia and bulimia she had lived since childhood. The memoir was controversial for its clinical specificity — accused of being a how-to. It is not. It is a document of a mind at war with itself, written with the precision that obsession produces.

Van der Kolk argues that trauma is not a psychological problem but a physiological one — the body stores it in places the talking cure cannot reach. The case studies are the devastation. The science is the hope. You will read this and understand your own reactions to things you thought were over.

Craig checks himself into a psychiatric ward and discovers the floor for teens has been closed — so he ends up with adults. Vizzini wrote from inside his own hospitalization, and you feel it. The humor is survival mechanism, not decoration. Vizzini died by suicide in 2013. The book preceded the worst by seven years.

Esther Greenwood wins a magazine prize and spends the summer in New York not being able to say what is wrong. The bell jar descends. Plath published this pseudonymously a month before her death. The novel's restoration of Esther is the story Plath was trying to write for herself.