18 Powerful Memoirs About Mental Illness & Addiction
Anthony Ray Hinton, who spent three decades on death row despite his innocence, never lost hope that he would one day again live as a free man. Geochemist and geobiologist Hope Jahren unearths stories from her career with this luminous debut probing her journeys in and out of the lab, the value of collaboration, and the wondrous lives of plants. As a teenager, Darnell Moore was targeted by a group of local boys who, blinded by hate, tried to set him alight—a harrowing encounter that became the spark for a courageous life spent in pursuit best alcoholic memoirs of justice. Sonali Deraniygala recounts surviving the unthinkable—a tsunami that claimed the lives of her husband, parents, and children—and moving forward in honor of everyone she had lost. With raw, complicated candor, Ariel Levy tells her deeply human story about having an affair, separating from her alcoholic wife, and experiencing the grief of miscarriage. Graced with sensitivity and warmth, Marlo Mack’s memoir on raising a transgender child is a thoughtful exploration of family, identity, and unconditional love and acceptance.
The Sober Diaries is one of the best books in the quit lit category. Funny, informative, and authentic, Poole has a welcoming light-hearted voice on the very serious topic of substance use. This book serves as a beacon to anyone who’s looking to change their relationship with alcohol. As you embark on a sobriety or moderation journey, building a toolkit to keep you motivated and inspired can help you reach your goals.
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This is one of the most compelling books on recovery and humanity ever written. Dr. Maté shares the powerful insight that substance use is, in many cases, a survival mechanism. When something awful happens to us, our way to cope is to turn off and even turn against ourselves, as a method of resilience. The book discusses drug policies, substance use treatment, and the root causes of substance use.
What he uncovers smashes his romanticized stories of partying and exposes painful truths about his drug-fogged years, but also charts his remarkable recovery. Before he was a feted columnist for The New York Times, David Carr was a cocaine addict, frequenter https://ecosoberhouse.com/ of crackhouses, low-level drug dealer, heavy drinker, and brawler. He beat up girlfriends, fathered twins he couldn’t support, was repeatedly jailed, and—in the incident that gives the book its title—once had a close friend draw a gun on him.
Shazia Omar on The Best Novels on Drug Addiction
Recovery also develops from these same forces and that’s why one-size-fits-all treatment doesn’t work. Clegg had a thriving life as a literary agent when he walked away from his seemingly-fulfilling world for a two-month crack binge. Having just been released from rehab nine months earlier, his relapse cost him his home, money, career and almost his life. Capturing the drama, tension, paranoia and short-term bliss of drug addiction, his book explores how the patterns of addiction can be traced to the past.
These accounts can be harrowing, but almost always offer comfort and education. Memoirs of mental health and addiction can also fill in the gaps of knowledge that those on the outside need to relate to those struggling with mental illness and addiction. This list of the 50 best mental health and addiction memoirs encompasses a wide scope of diagnoses, functionality, and experiences as diverse as the spectrum of mental illness. Jamison writes about her recovery as well as she does about her addiction. “Sobriety often felt like gripping onto monkey bars with sweaty metallic palms,” she writes, describing how it was to quit drinking again after a relapse.
Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind by Jamie Lowe
Dry Humping is filled with alcohol-free date ideas, scripts for awkward conversations, tips from experts, prompts, people’s perspectives, and more. For more resources in sobriety, online alcohol treatment programs like Ria Health can help as well. Ria Health is a smartphone-based program that assists people in reaching their unique alcohol-related goals, whether that means cutting back or quitting for good.
In this memoir, the acclaimed author of “London Fields,” “Money” and other novels decided, he writes, “to speak, for once, without artifice.” The entertaining, loosely structured result is movingly earnest and wickedly funny. It includes a portrait, both cleareyed and affectionate, of the author’s father, the comic novelist and poet Kingsley Amis. In addition, “Experience” offers more vivid and harrowing writing about dental problems than you might have thought one person capable of producing. The American-born daughter of Chinese immigrants, Kingston navigates a bewildering journey between worlds, each one stifling yet perforated by inconsistencies. There’s the Chinese village of Kingston’s ancestors, where girls learn the song of the warrior woman while being told they are destined to become a wife and a slave.
