Books like No one cares about crazy people by Ron Powers

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

A twelve‑year‑old girl with a vivid imagination battles her own mental illness over three years, guided by a compassionate psychotherapist who teaches her to confront the fantasy world she has built.

This way madness lies traces the evolution of mental illness treatment from madhouses to modern psychiatric hospitals, showing how institutions shaped society’s view of mental health through historic archives and patient art.

Robert Whitaker’s investigative history of mental‑health treatment traces how practices from the 18th century to today have often worsened, rather than improved, the lives of severe mental‑illness patients.

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.

An insider’s chronicle of the federal mental‑health revolution spurred by JFK’s 1963 proclamation, detailing the birth and flaws of deinstitutionalization and its lasting impact on policy and care for the mentally ill.

Pete Earley, a former Washington Post reporter, recounts his family's harrowing experience with the mental health system as his son‑in‑law enters a manic episode and is convicted, exposing the gap between care and punishment for the mentally ill.