Books like Mad Girl by Bryony Gordon

The Bell Jar is the sole novel by Sylvia Plath, a psychologically intense and autobiographical look at a young woman’s decline into mental illness.

xxxv, 338 pages ; 21 cm

Twelve Black British women and people of diverse identities share intertwined stories across Britain, revealing family ties, love, and social change.

A romance novel featuring a bachelorette who is transformed into a woman and a bachelorette who falls in love with her.

Johann Hari investigates the roots of depression and anxiety, arguing that modern lifestyles—not chemical imbalances—are the primary culprits, and presents nine real causes along with seven alternative solutions.

Michael Pollan explores how LSD and psilocybin are being used to treat depression, addiction, and anxiety, combining personal experience with scientific research and historical context.

A first‑person account of a young man's descent into psychosis, his experience in mental hospitals, and his ultimate recovery, highlighting the harsh treatments and the triumph of the human spirit.

From Kay Redfield Jamison - an international authority on manic-depressive illness, and one of the few women who are full professors of medicine at American universities - a remarkable personal testimony: the revelation of her own struggle since adolescence with manic-depression, and how it has shaped her life. Vividly, directly, with candor, wit, and simplicity, she takes us into the fascinating and dangerous territory of this form of madness - a world in which one pole can be the alluring dark land ruled by what Byron called the "melancholy star of the imagination," and the other a desert of depression and, all too frequently, death. A moving and exhilarating memoir by a woman whose furious determination to learn the enemy, to use her gifts of intellect to make a difference, led her to become, by the time she was forty, a world authority on manic-depression, and whose work has helped save countless lives.

When it was first published in France in 1961 as Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la Folie à l'âge Classique, few had heard of a thirty-four year old philosopher by the name of Michel Foucault. By the time an abridged English edition was published in 1967 as Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault had shaken the intellectual world. This translation is the first English edition of the complete French texts of the first and second edition, including all prefaces and appendices, some of them unavailable in the existing French edition. History of Madness begins in the Middle Ages with vivid descriptions of the exclusion and confinement of lepers. Why, Foucault asks, when the leper houses were emptied at the end of the Middle Ages, were they turned into places of confinement for the mad? Why, within the space of several months in 1656, was one out of every hundred people in Paris confined? Shifting brilliantly from Descartes and early Enlightenment thought to the founding of the Hôpital Général in Paris and the work of early psychiatrists Philippe Pinel and Samuel Tuke, Foucault focuses throughout, not only on scientific and medical analyses of madness, but also on the philosophical and cultural values attached to the mad. He also urges us to recognize the creative and liberating forces that madness represents, brilliantly drawing on examples from Goya, Nietzsche, Van Gogh and Artaud. The History of Madness is an inspiring and classic work that challenges us to understand madness, reason and power and the forces that shape them.

The Madwoman is a powerful psychological and emotional energy that lies at the core of feminine existence. She lives in us all - both men and women - and speaks to us all, inhabiting our dreams, our lives, our collective cultural memory. Ignored or suppressed, she becomes a force of self-destruction; acknowledged and understood, she becomes a source of creativity and power. Now, in this remarkable and revolutionary book, Linda Leonard explores how we can overcome the. Inner turmoil of contemporary life - unexpressed rage, the buildup of guilt and anxiety - by harnessing this primal expression of our natural instincts. Look around you and you will see the Madwoman at work, rattling her cage: The angry housewife trapped in a loveless marriage ... The rejected lover who retreats into loneliness and self-loathing ... The unhappy bride who has chosen a husband to dominate rather than share her life ... The junior executive who sacrifices. Her own abilities to further those of her boss ... The abused woman, the abusive mother, the First Lady who remains society's second-class citizen. From Medea to Ophelia to Thelma and Louise, the paradox and patterns of "madness" are as old as time. But Linda Leonard argues that the chain can he broken, that the Madwoman within each of us not only can but must be freed and openly expressed and transformed into a source of constructive, creative energy. The author draws. On an extraordinary range of sources - ancient myths and fairy tales, contemporary films and literature, stories of historical and contemporary women, dreams, personal experiences, and psychological portraits - to design a model of empowerment for women today. Just as the goddesses of old had to be appeased for the good of all, so the Madwoman in ourselves must now be nurtured in order to ensure the health and well-being of the individual, society, and the environment. By befriending the inner Madwoman, both women and men will discover the feminine spirit within themselves, a discovery that can lead to a deeper sense of being and human community. Women will also discover the courage and the strength to confront injustice and effect positive change in the home, the workplace, and the ballot box; and men will learn how to relate to the women in their lives in more mature and fulfilling ways. Meeting the Madwoman brings a fresh and. Startling perspective to those relationships that hold the potential for the greatest joy and the greatest misery: the relationship between a man and a woman, between a mother and a daughter, between love and sex, power and fear, self-destruction and self-realization. It is a provacative work of immense psychological insight and cultural significance, one whose ideas are sure to resonate for years to come.