Deals with total institutions in general and, mental hospitals, in particular. This book focuses on the world of the inmate. It includes essays that focus on the same issue - the inmate's situation in an institutional context. Its chapters approach the central issue from different vantage points, drawing upon different sources in sociology.

A few years ago, psychiatrist Brian Weiss was approached for treatment by Catherine, a 27-year-old suffering from anxiety, depression, panic attacks and phobias. This book tells the story of Catherine's successful treatment and how her case was to make a vital contribution to Dr Weiss's work.

Here, medical journalist Robert Whitaker reveals an astounding truth: schizophrenics in the United States currently fare worse than patients in the world's poorest countries. He traces over three centuries of cures for madness, questioning our obligations to the mad.

The cult classic that can still change your life!

London, 1918. Billy Prior is working for Intelligence in the Ministry of Munitions. But his encounters with women and men - pacifists, homosexuals - conflict with his duties as a soldier, and it is not long before his sense of himself fragments and breaks down. This book studies the contradictions of war and of those forced to live through it.

Ageless, sexless, deathless and timeless, Pilgrim has inhabited endless lives and times. On April 15, 1912, he fails to commit suicide, his heart starting again five hours after he is found hanging from a tree. Admitted to a clinic in Zurich, he begins a battle of wills with Carl Jung.

Dispels the silence and shame that surround the subject of suicide and provides a better understanding of the suicidal mind and a chance to recognize the person at risk. This book offers an analysis that helps us to comprehend the profound and disturbing sense of loss created in those left behind.

As a psychiatrist in a top-security mental hospital in the 1950s, Peter Cleave has made a study of what he calls the catastrophic love affair characterized by sexual obsession. His experience is extensive, and is never surprised. Until, that is, he comes reluctantly to accept that the wife of one of his colleagues has embarked on such an affair.

This work explores what we really mean by madness , covering an enormous range of topics from witches to creative geniuses, electric shock therapy to sexual deviancy, psychoanalysis to prozac.

Do you realise you, and all the people you know, play games? All the time? Sexual games, marital games, complex games that you're not even aware of as you go about your usual life? This book offers an analysis of the games we play in order to live with one another - and with ourselves.

The ground-breaking historical whodunnit, in which 1890s New York is as much a character as the investigators.

Begins in the Middle Ages with vivid descriptions of the exclusion and confinement of lepers. Why, the author 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?

Confronting and solving problems is a painful process, which most of us attempt to avoid. Drawing on his own professional experience, the author, a psychiatrist, suggests ways in which facing our difficulties can enable us to reach a higher level of self-understanding. He discusses the nature of loving relationships.

An account, both harrowing and amusing, of the author's dependence on Prozac, prescribed for her after a series of suicide attempts and breakdowns. She describes her experiences and her determination to get herself off medication.

All Wingos share one heritage... shrimp fishing, poverty and the memory of a terrifying event - the source of Tom Wingo's self-hatred and his sister Savannah's despair. To save himself and Savannah, Tom confronts the past with the help of New York psychologist Susan Lowenstein. This work chronicles the family of Wingos of Colleton, South Carolina.

The brilliant new novel from the bestselling author of 'Mr Golightly's Holiday' and 'Miss Garnet's Angel'.

Contains eight case-studies of people the author has treated, including a woman of 67, obsessively pining with love for her 32-year-old previous therapist and a woman of 19 stone who has emotional difficulties because of her weight problem. This title includes stories that reveal the diversity of human motivation.