Suicide and Mental Illness Awareness Theme Read - September and October

Suicide and Mental Illness Awareness Theme Read



The time has come to start thinking about what you're going to read (or watch) for my upcoming Suicide and Mental Illness Awareness Theme! This is going to be an informal event occurring during the months of September and October. Anyone who wants to participate can hop in at any point during these two months and post a link to a review of a book or movie/show/documentary that promotes suicide and mental illness awareness.

As I said in my post To ASIST or not to assist, I believe that it is very important for people to be open and supportive about mental illness and suicidal ideation. Stigma pollutes our culture, discouraging people who need help from speaking out - it's the people who talk who end up healing. We need more healthy people in the world, and suicide and mental illness advocacy is one way to promote this goal.

During my event, I will have posts which collect links to reviews from participants. I will host suicide / mental illness giveaways. And, hopefully, I can find some guest bloggers who wish to share their thoughts and experiences in mental illness advocacy. Please let me know if you have something you want to share!

There's no need to formally sign up for this event, but if you'd like, it would be nice to get a headcount in the comments to this post...so I know how many giveaways I should plan. See you all soon!

Suggestions

Popular Mental Illness books (Goodreads list) - Several of the books on this list I have already read or are on my TBR mountain.

11 of the most Realistic Portrayals of Mental Illness in Novels - This is a pretty interesting article with some good suggestions. And don't miss the embedded list of 20 Greatest Memoirs of Mental Illness.

Mental Illness in Fiction (Wikipedia) - This interesting list includes some much older books as well as some unexpected inclusions (LOTR? - Ok, yeah, I guess Golem was mentally ill, but...it DOES make kind of a fun list, though. And you can feel free to be )

Contemporary YA books featuring mental illness - What is a list of books without YA these days? ;)

NAMI Blog: The Top 10 Movies about Mental Illness - This is a really good list (should be, coming from NAMI). I've seen 6 of them. :)

10 Gripping Films about Mental Illness - This list seems pretty good, as well.

10 Best Portrayals of Mental Illness in Modern Movies - This list, I suspect, is more about the acting than about psychology. From I totally agree with the assessment of great acting on this list!

I'm still finalizing the plans for my blog Resistance is Futile. As soon as I do, I'll post a list of suggestions for books / movies etc. :)

Count me in. Not sure what I'll read yet, but I will be here to support you!

Thanks Tina! I think it will be fun. I've got some guest posters for my blog, and so I can post that information here, too (or just the links, if the entire post is a bit cumbersome). It should be fun. :)

I am not a part of the 75ers, but am very interested in this issue for so many reasons.

:) You don't have to be a member of the 75ers to participate! I'm happy you saw the thread.

Rachel, I started a book called Ultraviolet which I thought was going to be about a 16 year old girl who is placed in a mental institution after having a break down, but I think the book is going to head in a different direction with aliens. Strange but an interesting read.

Hey Judy...just checked it out. That DOES appear to be an interesting book, even if it wasn't what you expected. I hope you let us know what you think of it on this thread, anyway!

I'm going to try and take part in this. Can't make any promises, but I'll try.
It's a great idea and a wonderful initiative! :D

I'm in. I'll have to think about which books I want to read for this theme, but one of them will likely be The Last Asylum: A Memoir of Madness in Our Times by Barbara Taylor, which I bought in London this past spring.

ETA: I'll probably also read Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan.

I finished Ultraviolet and it did go off in a totally strange direction. I actually liked the first half of the book where the setting was a
psychiatric treatment center dealing with teen mental illnness. When the book took it's strange direction it became unbelievable and I lost interest.

I volunteered on a Suicide/Hotline for 25 years. Glad to see the issue being brought forward.

I don't know what I'll read but as far as movies go, I was really impressed by the movie, "Slender Thread."

>9 PawsforThought: Hope you'll be able to join for at least one book or movie during September and October! :)

>10 kidzdoc: Hey Darryl! I've been interested in reading Brain on Fire, it looks really interesting. Unfortunately, I don't have time time for it this time around - unless I somehow got it by audiobook. :)

>11 DeltaQueen50: That's interesting about Ultraviolet, Judy, too bad you lost interest in it. Thanks for letting us know!

>12 majkia: Hi Jean! It's a very important issue, isn't it?

>13 avidmom: I haven't even heard of "Slender Thread" what's it about?

>14 The_Hibernator: "Slender Thread" stars Sydney Poitier & Anne Bancroft. He's a worker at a suicide hotline center who answers her call and tries to talk her out of committing suicide. He also tries to find where she is. The whole entire movie is almost exclusively their phone conversation.

I was surprised I had never heard of it before considering who the stars of the movie were!

>12 majkia: You are a much stronger person than I am if you managed to volunteered for a hotline for that long. I don't think I'd be able to handle a single day before breaking down in tears. I applaud you.

>13 avidmom:/>15 avidmom: That sounds like a great movie (and with great actors). I'm going to put that on my list of Hollywood classics to watch.

I thought I had already posted here, but guess not. I've been thinking about what to read.

I really need to concentrate on reading books from Planet TBR if I'm going to complete my ROOT challenge, so I've got six from the good planet that I'll think about reading. I probably won't get all of them done, so I may continue on through November and December.

I'm planning to start out with a memoir, Prozac Nation, followed by a book about mental health and spirituality called Simply Sane.

>17 streamsong: Thanks for reminding me of Prozac Nation. I've been meaning to put in on the TBR list but must have forgotten.

Currently listening to A Beautiful Mind, by Sylvia Nasar. It's stressing me out.

Also reading Mr Monk and Philosophy, edited by E.D. Wittkower. Thought reviewing the TV show Monk (a show about a private investigagor with debilatating OCD) would be interesting, and I find the Popular Culture and Philosophy a vert interesting series. :)

>19 The_Hibernator: "It's stressing me out." That happens to me when I read some memoirs that hit a little too close to home.

I've enjoyed the first two of the Bo Bradley mysteries by Abigail Padgett. Bradley's a child services investigator who has bipolar - and in at least the first two books her clients are native Americans. The series starts with Child of Silence. I may try to go on with with the third one, which unfortunately, isn't available through my library's ILL, and I have myself on a book acquiring embargo until I get Planet TBR whittled down a bit.

I'll join this theme read and go for Girl, interrupted as it's one I've meant to read for several years. It also fits my category challenge - books to film.

A YA that I found memorable is Adam Rapp's Under the Wolf, Under the Dog. Rapp has written a few episodes of the tv series In treatment.

I plan to read The Noonday Demon: an Atlas of Depression.

Looks like I have started early. I'm doing a reread of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for the RL book club next week. I had forgotten that Phaedrus struggled with depression, and unless I'm remembering wrong, had ECT.

>22 karspeak: That's another good one that's living on my TBR planet ..... I've read a few bits here and there.

>23 streamsong: I really enjoyed the author's TED talk (his first one).

I posted this in the opener, too, but just in case none of you want to look up there, here's what I've come up with for suggestions. Currently, I had to give A Beautiful Mind back to the library, but I'll get it again soon. Surely in time to finish for the theme. In the mean-time, I've managed to get hold of We Need To Talk About Kevin from the library, so I can start that audiobook instead.

Suggestions

Popular Mental Illness books (Goodreads list) - Several of the books on this list I have already read or are on my TBR mountain.

11 of the most Realistic Portrayals of Mental Illness in Novels - This is a pretty interesting article with some good suggestions. And don't miss the embedded list of 20 Greatest Memoirs of Mental Illness.

Mental Illness in Fiction (Wikipedia) - This interesting list includes some much older books as well as some unexpected inclusions (LOTR? - Ok, yeah, I guess Golem was mentally ill, but...it DOES make kind of a fun list, though. And you can feel free to be )

Contemporary YA books featuring mental illness - What is a list of books without YA these days? ;)

NAMI Blog: The Top 10 Movies about Mental Illness - This is a really good list (should be, coming from NAMI). I've seen 6 of them. :)

10 Gripping Films about Mental Illness - This list seems pretty good, as well.

10 Best Portrayals of Mental Illness in Modern Movies - This list, I suspect, is more about the acting than about psychology. From I totally agree with the assessment of great acting on this list!

woops. that post was an accident! Hi everyone!

I will join the theme read with at least one of these books from my TBRs:
When We Were Romans by Matthew Kneale
The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson from the Wikipedia list

A couple of others I've read that I highly recommend:
The Earth Hums in B Flat by Mari Strachan
Annie's Ghosts: A Journey Into a Family Secret by Steve Luxenberg

Crazy by Linda Vigen Phillips



Crazy is a novel told in verse about Laura, young girl growing up in the 1960's - a time in which it is taboo to talk about mental illness. As such, she is always coming up with excuses for why her friends can't come to her house and why her mother is always so...absent. But as her mother's illness intensifies and mounting fears that whatever is wrong with her could be hereditary, Laura has no choice but to demand answers from the adults around her who are trying to hard to keep secret what is really wrong with her mom, lest she go crazy herself.

I really liked the book. I've read a novel-in-verse or 2 in the past and they always seem to do a great job of focusing on the emotion of a scene, and this is certainly a good example of that. It also did a great job of demonstrating the confusion and lack of information about mental illness during the time period, and the revelation at the end is both heartbreaking and deeply encouraging. It demonstrates how important it is to be open and honest about such things, regardless of how difficult it is.

Yay! Thanks for the review Stephen!

I plan to read from my TBR shelf, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness, Kay Redfield Jamison's memoir of her struggle with bipolar disorder (from back in the day when it was called manic depression).

She was actually a professor of psychiatry at UCLA Medical at the time of her first major crisis. I need to follow up on her life since.

My best friend in high school was bipolar, and was on her 4th marriage before she finally got a diagnosis and the proper treatment to stabilize her life.

It's so important for knowledge to spread about mental health issues!!!

ETA to correct data and add -- Jamison is on the faculty and mental health staff at Johns Hopkins, highly respected.

>30 tymfos: apologies for jumping in unannounced (actually, this is announcing :) ) but I'm very interested in mental health issues.

Jamison is quite a good resource. Here is a link to her op-ed piece in the NY Times following Robin Williams' suicide:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/16/opinion/depression-can-be-treated-but-it-takes...

It doesn't specifically mention Williams.

I loved A Beautiful Mind. Nash's life and achievements were (are) so singular. The movie was less successful at portraying his struggles with psychosis.

And (>22 karspeak:) I have rarely if ever found anyone as articulate as Andrew Solomon.,

>31 stellarexplorer: Thanks for the link to the article! Very good.

>31 stellarexplorer: Hi Stellaexplorer! Thanks for jumping in! Glad you found the thread. I wish I knew how to advertise it better - it's not mean to be only for 75ers.

I've wondered about adding a link on this thread:
http://www.librarything.com/topic/161441

>33 The_Hibernator: yes, it was a completely (happy) serendipitous discovery while doing something else...

I wonder if there's some similar type of group over in Club Read or Book Snobs?

>31 stellarexplorer: Solomon is really blowing me away with his intelligence, insight, and, as you said, how articulate he is.

>30 tymfos: I enjoyed both of the Jamison books I've read: An Unquiet Mind and Touched with Fire.

I finished -- quite quickly -- An Unquiet Mind. Wow. I was just blown away by her candor, given that at the time she wrote the book, it was still pretty much taboo for doctors to publicly admit to having any kind of mental illness. This was a ground-breaking work.

I put more comments on my thread here:

https://www.librarything.com/topic/177791#4835212

>39 tymfos: still pretty taboo. If only her book alone were enough to eradicate that stigma!

She is incredibly productive despite her mental health challenges...

I just bought Waiting for Columbus which I am looking forward to reading.

OK. This may be cheating but here's my review for the movie, "The Slender Thread"

http://www.librarything.com/topic/163397#4569701

Movies aren't cheating!

Ha! I thought "cheating" since it's been so long since I watched/reviewed it. :)

I finished Mrs. Dalloway Friday morning and wrote some comments here on my Club Read Thread: http://www.librarything.com/topic/180241#4854242

The way Woolf gets "inside" the mind of Septimus, the WWI veteran, is quite eerie in its accuracy. The way Septimus is treated - his first doctor telling him that he's just "lost a sense of proportion" is maddening! I thought watching Septimus's wife agonize over her husband's odd behavior - and then, at the end, almost get swept up in it, was also quite something.

I just finished The Memory of Love, set in Sierra Leone shortly after the end of its civil war. One of the main characters is a British psychologist in the country on a one-year appointment to help those who lived through the war deal with post-traumatic stress. Where do you start when almost everyone in the country is experiencing post-traumatic stress? What is a realistic goal for treatment? What does a psychologist from outside have to offer those who live there? It's a thought-provoking book. I posted a review on my thread: http://www.librarything.com/topic/177142#4864560

Despite the best of intentions, I didn't get anything read for this theme in September. I've just started Simply Sane: The Spirituality of Mental Health by Gerald May.

And I'll offer my review of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which I read at the end of August, but didn't get the review on my thread until September.

If you were in college in the 70's, you may well be familiar with this one.

In this autobiographical novel, the author manages to weave philosophy, mechanical engineering, recovering from a mental breakdown and taking a road trip into one narrative, creating a book with an almost cult-like following.

Our narrator does not refer to himself by name although he calls his previous self Phaedrus. He is travelling cross country by motorcycle with his son, Chris, and other friends who accompany them partway. In his head he writes a chautauqua, a narrative with teaching points, as he goes.

Phaedrus had been a college professor and then returning graduate student who had a mental breakdown due to what he calls paranoid schizophrenia with depression. Phaedrus was hospitalized and given several dozen electrical shock therapy treatments, which caused him to lose the memory of his previous life. He hopes that during this long trip, he can reconnect with his son, who is showing many signs of stress which our narrator fears are early signs of mental illness. He also hopes that he can find the part of his own life that is missing.

During the trip, he is obsessed with the technological maintenance of his motorcycle - spending part of each day fiddling with various mechanical processes and using it as vehicle (pun intended :-)) to explore the philosophies of technology and humanity and what the notion of quality is - if one cannot define what is good, how can one find it? Is quality the Buddha that permeates all things in life?

I had listened to an abridged, audio version of this book several years ago. Since I'm not well-grounded in philosophy and not much interested in mechanical workings, I knew I missed major points and so, I had picked up a print copy from a library sale table. I'm not sure I would have ever reread it though, without the push of reading it for my book club.

I know that even with the reread, many of the philosophical points sailed right over my head and I skimmed over some of the seemingly endless discussion. Overall, though, I found it a trip worth taking. Recommended primarily for those who enjoy philosophical argument.

I finished Noonday Demon and thought it was excellent, well deserving of the National Book Award. A true labor of love by a very intelligent, articulate and caring author. Highly recommended if you want a thorough exploration of depression, although be advised that it is 400+ pages.

>47 streamsong: I'll be interested in your review of the Gerald May book when you finish it. I read his Addiction and Grace when I took a class about addiction counseling in seminary, and thought it was very good.

I'm celebrating by being too depressed to read for the past two months. Cheers!

>48 karspeak: My thoughts exactly!

The secrets they kept

The author discovered that her grandfather had entered into a suicide pact with his youngest daughter after she was diagnosed with 'dementia praecox' (schizophrenia) at age 16 after two suicide attempts. He succeeding in killing her, but himself survived his severe injuries.

Perhaps the most uncomfortable thing about the book is how little information about the dead girl survived. The family truly kept their secrets well.