A mordant, wickedly subversive parable set in a mental ward, the novel chronicles the head-on collision between its hell-raising, life-affirming hero Randle Patrick McMurphy and the totalitarian rule of Big Nurse. McMurphy swaggers into the mental ward like a blast of fresh air and turns the place upside down, starting a gambling operation, smuggling in wine and women, and egging on the other patients to join him in open rebellion. But McMurphy's...

"From "weird, scary, ingenious" (The New York Times) stand-up comedian Maria Bamford, a brutally honest and hilariously frenetic memoir about show business, mental health, and the comfort of rigid belief systems--from Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, to Suzuki violin training, to Richard Simmons, to 12-step programs. Maria Bamford is a comedian's comedian (an outsider among outsiders) and has forever fought to find a place...

"A tender but unflinching portrayal of the bond between two sisters."--Celeste Ng, New York Times bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere and Everything I Never Told You. A dazzling novel of two sisters and their emotional journey through love, loyalty, and heartbreak Two sisters--Miranda, the older, responsible one, always her younger sister's protector; Lucia, the headstrong, unpredictable one, whose impulses are huge and, often, life changing....

"A rural physician learns that a former doctor at his clinic committed a shocking crime, leading him to uncover an undiagnosed mental health crisis in our broken prison system--a powerful true story expanding on one of the most popular This American Life episodes of all time. When family physician Dr. Benjamin Gilmer began working at the Cane Creek clinic in rural North Carolina, he was following in the footsteps of a man with the same last name....

"New York Times bestselling author Ron Powers offers a searching, richly researched narrative of the social history of mental illness in America paired with the deeply personal story of his two sons' battles with schizophrenia. From the centuries of torture of "lunatiks" at Bedlam Asylum to the infamous eugenics era to the follies of the anti-psychiatry movement to the current landscape in which too many families struggle alone to manage afflicted...

Pushing away her devoted husband, a once-successful writer moves back into her bohemian childhood home, where she struggles to come to terms with the mental illness that has overshadowed her life.

While breaking the hottest news story of the year, broadcast journalist Isabel Murphy falls apart on live television in front of an audience of millions. She lands at Three Breezes, a four-star psychiatric hospital nicknamed the "nut hut," where she begins the painful process of recovering the life everyone thought she had.
But accepting her place among her fellow patients proves difficult, and Isabel struggles to reconcile the fact that...

"[Shields is] unsparing as she explores the black holes of uncertainty in women's lives . . . these are the dark thoughts of an illuminating novel." —Chicago Tribune
The final book from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carol Shields, Unless is a harrowing but ultimately consoling story of one family's anguish and healing, proving Shields's mastery of extraordinary fiction about ordinary life.
For all of her life, forty-four-year-old...

Following an emotional collapse a woman is placed in a mental institution by her husband. The severity of her depression causes her sympathetic doctor to try electric shock, hydrotherapy, and drugs, along with psychoanalysis.

A bold contemporary adaptation of Anton Chekhov's legendary short story, Ward no. 6 chronicles one man's descent into madness. Updating the 1892 tale to the present day, the film is shot in a real mental institution on the outskirts of Moscow, and features interviews with actual patients.