Books like Ben behind his voices by Randye Kaye

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.

Eighteen‑year‑old Susanna Kaysen is admitted to McLean Hospital in 1967, where she documents life in the psychiatric ward, exploring mental illness, recovery, and the cultural landscape of the late 1960s.

A true‑story portrait of the Shield family, twelve children—six with schizophrenia—whose lives spurred groundbreaking research into the disease.

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.

Elyn R. Saks, a distinguished professor and lawyer, chronicles her lifelong battle with schizophrenia, detailing how she overcame challenges to build a respected career in law, psychology, and psychiatry.

A personal narrative following Mark Vonnegut’s late‑1960s and early‑1970s journey—college graduate, communal farm life, father, dog, and car—through a series of nervous breakdowns, bordering on humor and despair, concluding with his survival and search for meaning.

After witnessing the talented but troubled violinist Nathaniel Ayers on Los Angeles’ Skid Row, journalist Steve Lopez launches a mission to restore his music and humanity, gathering instruments, arranging performances, and fighting homelessness and schizophrenia.

The memoir follows two identical twin sisters—one a schizophrenic, the other a psychiatrist—exploring how the illness of one reshapes their relationship and forces the other to step beyond her shadow.