These are a collection of books which may be of interest to you in your quest to educate, comfort and understand yourself, and yes, ultimately, help yourself through your illness or that of a loved one. All the books selected here have been chosen for their insight and for their thorough understanding of the issues that Phoenix Depression Chat focuses on.

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We hope that you find the following useful and inspiring.

Should you have any recommendations for this page, please e-mail us at chat_management@hotmail.com.

Novels:

Prozac Nation

An account, both harrowing and amusing, of the author's dependence on Prozac, prescribed for her after a series of suicide attempts and breakdowns. She describes her experiences and her determination to get herself off medication.

Mockingbird years

In the spirit of "Girl", "Interrupted" and "An Unquiet Mind" this is a writer's chronicle of her long journey through psychotherapy and her eventual escape from it. "During my years as a patient, I felt a guilty and unshakeable conviction that I was completely sane. Of course, my notion that patients were expected to be crazy was a naive one, but I had swallowed whole the ideology that connects madness to beauty of spirit. In fact, I wasn't interested in being happier, but in growing more poignantly, becomingly, meaningfully unhappy". In this memoir, she tells the story of her "therapeutic education," marked by no fewer than five therapists before she turned 17. At 18, after a half-hearted suicide attempt, Gordon, mired in adolescent angst, began a three-year sojourn at the prestigious Austen Riggs sanitarium. It was at Riggs that Gordon was "rescued" by the maverick psychoanalyst Leslie Farber.

The Bell Jar

A student from Boston wins a guest editorship on a national magazine, and finds a new world at her feet. Her New York life is crowded with possibilities, so the choice of future is overwhelming. She is faced with the perennial problems of morality, behaviour and identity.

At 23, Lizzie is leaving her job as an award-winning producer at a hot NYC theatre and going on a quest to find other like herself. Just before college, Lizzie was diagnosed as bipolar as a result of a severe period of depression and mania. Her aim is to find other young folks who are bipolar and successful in their lives, not simply just surviving or coping with being bipolar. Detour is a difficult book to describe, but Lizzie’s writing and descriptions are very clear and instantly drew me into her life and need to find a common bond with others. She’s able to describe what it’s like to be bipolar, and through interviewing others she sheds a lot of light on this disease that had previously been a mystery to me. Hopefully her words will help dissolve some of the stereotypes about mental illnesses and the many people living with them. [by www.thoughtworm.com]

Skin Games

"People ask me why, after keeping my history of self-injury a secret for so long, I chose to reveal it in such a very public way," says Caroline Kettlewell, about her memoir of self-injury, Skin Game.

Stick Figure

Washington Post Book World
Poignant...Gottlieb is dead-on about society's irrational attitudes towards women's bodies.

The Quiet Room

Presents the inner life of a schizophrenic through diary excerpts and interviews with family members and doctors.

Unholy ghost

A collection of writings on depression and its effects includes contributions from Russell Banks, Ann Beattie, Meri Danquah, Donald Hall, Susanna Kaysen, Larry McMurtry, and Rose Styron.

Self Help:

What to Do When Someone You love Is Depressed

Describes the warning signs of clinical depression, and explains how to offer comfort, maintain communications, deal with the mental health community, and handle suicide threats.

Breaking The Patterns Of Depression

Offers the skills for understanding and ultimately averting recurring cycles depression, including structured activities that show how to solve problems use self-knowledge to stay out of hurtful situations.

Undoing Depression

what the author has to say
I wanted to write a book to address the issue of preventing depression. The emphasis is too often focused on treatment after someone has hit rock bottom. There is a sense that depression is something that happens to you without warning. I disagree. I think there is a warning - that people do lead a depressed lifestyle before they feel depressed - and that people should be encouraged to believe there is a lot they can do to avoid hitting bottom and to make their recovery much faster and more effective. And because of my own personal experience with depression, I feel a strong desire to help prevent people from suffering what my family and I have gone through. So I've tried to lay out a roadmap for people to follow through recovery. I've taken the "practice wisdom" of good psychotherapy and put it into a form that people can follow to help themselves as they deal with depression in their thinking, their behaviour, their emotions, their relationships, and their self-image.

Anxiety & Panic Attacks

Offers a simple program for overcoming the debilitating effects of anxiety.

Our guide explains what panic attacks are, why they happen and what every sufferer can do to empower themselves, regain control and make panic a thing of the past. Containing a broad range of topics including: what to do during an attack; what's happening during an attack; self-help to prevent attacks from developing; information for friends & relatives about panic attacks lifestyle, therapies and complementary therapies.

Living with Manic depression

The actress and a medical reporter describe what it is like to live with manic depression, the latest findings on its probable causes, its wide range of symptoms, and its most effective treatments.

Reference:

A companion volume to the best-selling Concise Medical Dictionary, this new dictionary is an ideal source of reference on the wide range of medicines available today. Containing 4,000 entries, it covers over-the-counter, pharmacy, and prescription medicines. Written in an accessible style, it is perfect for meeting the increasing demands from patients and their families for information about the medicines they are taking.

This comprehensive guide offers straight talk that can help people with bipolar disorder take charge of their illness and reclaim their lives. It is filled with practical self-assessment and self-management strategies from a compassionate professional.