I don't want to be crazy - Samantha Schutz

“I am trying to find myself
in all of the chaos,
find something that I can call me
inside the screams and inside
the 'you should' and 'you have to be.” 

A harrowing, remarkable poetry memoir about one girl's struggle with anxiety disorder.

This is a true story of growing up, breaking down, and coming to grips with a psychological disorder. When Samantha Schutz first left home for college, she was excited by the possibilities -- freedom from parents, freedom from a boyfriend who was reckless with her affections, freedom from the person she was supposed to be. At first, she revelled in the independence ... but as pressures increased , she began to suffer anxiety attacks that would leave her mentally shaken and physically incapacitated. Thus began a hard road of discovery and coping, powerfully rendered in this poetry memoir



http://rapidgator.net/file/3972c99a638b9ec44af79bd5c6304497/I_Don't_Want_to_be_Crazy_-_Samantha_Schutz.pdf.html

Speak - Laurie Halse Anderson

 “It's easier not to say anything. Shut your trap, button your lip, can it. All that crap you hear on TV about communication and expressing feelings is a lie. Nobody really wants to hear what you have to say.”

  “Do they choose to be so dense? Were they born that way? I have no friends. I have nothing. I say nothing. I am nothing. ”

Melinda Sordino busted an end-of-summer party by calling the cops. Now her old friends won't talk to her, and people she doesn't even know hate her from a distance. The safest place to be is alone, inside her own head. But even that's not safe. Because there's something she's trying not to think about, something about the night of the party that, if she let it in, would blow her carefully constructed disguise to smithereens. And then she would have to speak the truth. 




http://rapidgator.net/file/963d0bc79c69b0ebe7038fb6d2013552/Laurie-Halse-Anderson---Speak.pdf.html 

I never promised you a rose garden - Joanne Greenberg

 “Sometimes the world is so much sicker than the inmates of its institutions.”

“The hidden strength is too deep a secret. But in the end...in the end it is our only ally.” 

“...to experience the reality was to suffer a boredom as endless as the illness itself...the boredom of insanity was a great desert, so great that anyone's violence or agony seemed an oasis, and the brief companionship seemed like a rain in the desert that was numbered and counted and remembered long after it was gone.”

"I Never Promised You a Rose Garden" is the story of a sixteen-year-old who retreats from reality into the bondage of a lushly imagined but threatening kingdom, and her slow and painful journey back to sanity.


http://rapidgator.net/file/26ca2982b872c7fe444038c7289f45e9/i_never_promised_you_a_rose_garden_-_joanne_greenberg.pdf.html

It's kind of a Funny Story - Ned Vizzini

 “Its so hard to talk when you want to kill yourself. That's above and beyond everything else, and it's not a mental complaint-it's a physical thing, like it's physically hard to open your mouth and make the words come out. They don't come out smooth and in conjunction with your brain the way normal people's words do; they come out in chunks as if from a crushed-ice dispenser; you stumble on them as they gather behind your lower lip. So you just keep quiet.”

Like many ambitious New York City teenagers, Craig Gilner sees entry into Manhattan's Executive Pre-Professional High School as the ticket to his future. Determined to succeed at life-which means getting into the right high school to get into the right college to get the right job-Craig studies night and day to ace the entrance exam, and does. That's when things start to get crazy.

At his new school, Craig realizes that he isn't brilliant compared to the other kids; he's just average, and maybe not even that. He soon sees his once-perfect future crumbling away. The stress becomes unbearable and Craig stops eating and sleeping-until, one night, he nearly kills himself.

Craig's suicidal episode gets him checked into a mental hospital, where his new neighbors include a transsexual sex addict, a girl who has scarred her own face with scissors, and the self-elected President Armelio. There, isolated from the crushing pressures of school and friends, Craig is finally able to confront the sources of his anxiety.

Ned Vizzini, who himself spent time in a psychiatric hospital, has created a remarkably moving tale about the sometimes unexpected road to happiness. For a novel about depression, it's definitely a funny story.

http://rapidgator.net/file/485ae0697c1e25bdcac634733e38564c/It's_Kind_of_a_Funny_Story_-_Ned_Vizzini.pdf.html

The virgin suicides - Jeffrey Eugenides

“In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.” 

First published in 1993, The Virgin Suicides announced the arrival of a major new American novelist. In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters--beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys--commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year. As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family's fatal melancholy, in this hypnotic and unforgettable novel of adolescent love, disquiet, and death. Jeffrey Eugenides evokes the emotions of youth with haunting sensitivity and dark humor and creates a coming-of-age story unlike any of our time. Adapted into a critically acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola, The Virgin Suicides is a modern classic, a lyrical and timeless tale of sex and suicid.





http://rapidgator.net/file/559d63ef16bfd1dcc1dc6f2b150e9ca6/Jeffrey_Eugenides_-_The_Virgin_Suicides.pdf.html

Girl,interrupted - Susanna Kaysen

In 1967, after a session with a psychiatrist she'd never seen before, eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen was put in a taxi and sent to McLean Hospital. She spent most of the next two years on the ward for teenage girls in a psychiatric hospital as renowned for its famous clientele -- Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor, and Ray Charles -- as for its progressive methods of treating those who could afford its sanctuary.

Kaysen's memoir encompasses horror and razor-edged perception while providing vivid portraits of her fellow patients and their keepers. It is a brilliant evocation of a "parallel universe" set within the kaleidoscopically shifting landscape of the late sixties. Girl, Interrupted is a clear-sighted, unflinching document that gives lasting and specific dimension to our definitions of sane and insane, mental illness and recovery



http://rapidgator.net/file/3aab608f4c164554cb587bd8b1b976da/Susanna_Kaysen_-_Girl,_Interrupted.pdf.html

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath's shocking, realistic, and intensely emotional novel about a woman falling into the grip of insanity.

Esther Greenwood is brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under—maybe for the last time. In her acclaimed and enduring masterwork, Sylvia Plath brilliantly draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that her insanity becomes palpably real, even rational—as accessible an experience as going to the movies. A deep penetration into the darkest and most harrowing corners of the human psyche, The Bell Jar is an extraordinary accomplishment and a haunting American classic



http://rapidgator.net/file/dfcf75818d258159eae380bb26ba746a/The-Bell-Jar---Sylvia-Plath.pdf.html

Scars - Cheryl Rainfield

Kendra, fifteen, hasn't felt safe since she began to recall devastating memories of childhood sexual abuse, especially because she still can't remember the most important detail-- her abuser's identity. Frightened, Kendra believes someone is always watching and following her, leaving menacing messages only she understands. If she lets her guard down even for a minute, it could cost Kendra her life. To relieve the pressure, Kendra cuts; aside from her brilliantly expressive artwork, it's her only way of coping. Since her own mother is too self-absorbed to hear her cries for help, Kendra finds support in others instead: from her therapist and her art teacher, from Sandy, the close family friend who encourages her artwork, and from Meghan, the classmate who's becoming a friend and maybe more. But the truth about Kendra's abuse is just waiting to explode, with startling unforeseen consequences. Scars is the unforgettable story of one girl's frightening path to the truth.

http://rapidgator.net/file/8f8c999681a007d50ec3448537f0fc7b/Scars_-_Cheryl_Rainfield.pdf.html

Cut - Patricia McCormick

"A tingle arced across my scalp. The floor tipped up at me and my body spiraled away. Then I was on the ceiling looking down, waiting to see what would happen next."

Callie cuts herself. Never too deep, never enough to die. But enough to feel the pain. Enough to feel the scream inside.
Now she's at Sea Pines, a "residential treatment facility" filled with girls struggling with problems of their own. Callie doesn't want to have anything to do with them. She doesn't want to have anything to do with anyone. She won't even speak.
But Callie can only stay silent for so long....




http://rapidgator.net/file/077080d0245749f0fd28441e205cd7f3/Cut_-_Patricia_McCormick.pdf.html

Anonymous - Fighting with me

A honest and blunt journey through childhood, adolesence and then onto a psyriatric hospital through diary entries. This true story details intense thoughts, feelings and actions of someone struggling with the 'lables' of anorexia, borderline personality disorder and self harm and also talks in detail about suicidal thoughts, feelings and actions. Throughout this book raw emotions and actions are detailed and show a true insight into a troubled mind.







http://rapidgator.net/file/d584d12e572f51a5e7d078c32f7545be/Anonymous_-_Fighting_With_Me.pdf.html

Trisha Guru - Lying in Weight: The Hidden Epidemic of Eating disorders in Adult Women

A girl with an eating disorder grows up. And then what?
  In this groundbreaking book, science journalist Trisha Gura explodes the myth that those who suffer from eating disorders, including anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa, are primarily teenage girls. In truth, twenty-five to thirty million American women twenty-five and older suffer from serious food issues, from obsessions with calorie counting to compulsions to starve then overeat. These diseases often linger from adolescence or emerge anew in the lives of adult women in ways that we are only now starting to recognize.
Drawing on her own experience with anorexia, as well as the most up-to-date research and extensive interviews with clinicians and sufferers, Gura presents a startling, timely, and imperative investigation of eating disorders "all grown up," and offers hope through understanding.






http://rapidgator.net/file/b2fcb5eb2f4d94109e06a0197a2cc2e1/Trisha_Guru_-_Lying_in_Weight._The_Hidden_Epidemic_of_Eating_disorders_in_Adult_Women.pdf.html

Tammie Ronen and Ayelet - In & Out of Anorexia: The Story of the Client, the Therapist and the Process of Recovery

 

Interleaving the stories of therapist and client, this is a positive and helpful book for people with anorexia and those who care for them. Ayelet describes her experiences of this life-threatening illness, her repeated hospitalizations and eventual successful recovery, and includes examples of drawing and writing made when she was ill. Tammie, her therapist, outlines the progress of the cognitive constructivist therapy and the rationale behind her decisions and treatment considerations. Also included are an overview of current research into anorexia and its treatment and a glossary of key terms that make this book a comprehensive as well as inspiring resource. 









http://rapidgator.net/file/01e8d30b1378b9054e8a9d4520e11009/Tammie_Ronen_and_Ayelet_-_In_&_Out_of_Anorexia.pdf.html

Katie Metcalfe - Anorexia: A Stranger In the Family

The harrowing journey of obsession, family and 'the voice'. Katie Metcalfe takes readers through the daily struggle with this potentially lethal obsession. It is a harrowing account of her triumphs and tragedies on the long road to recovery after being hospitalized at 15. We learn of Katie's constant battle with 'the voice' when her pride at improving her health is overshadowed by the fear of over eating. It is a story of a young girl at war with herself and anyone who fights to keep her alive. However, Katie Metcalfe's book is more than a personal journey - it is the story of the impact of her illness on her family. With remarkable candor Katie's parents and siblings tell of the shocking impact on close relatives - when anorexia creates a stranger in the family. Katie's honesty combined with her talent for writing, gives a real sense of the horror of anorexia and its power to dominate lives. It is a true account of a family's hard won victory over a disease that kills.




http://rapidgator.net/file/e9d65135e820873ead32e2d93d4a9479/Katie_Metcalfe_-_Anorexia_a_Stranger_In_the_Family.pdf.html

Jenny Langley - Boys Get Anorexia Too: Coping With Male Eating Disorders

Eating disorders are usually associated with females but there are an increasing number of males affected by anorexia and bulimia. Often there is a link between male eating disorders and athletic prowess, and the quest for physical perfection can result in damaging behaviours associated with diet, supplements and exercise.
This unique and important book combines a mine of information with a readable and engaging case study. The author was shocked and horrified when her son developed anorexia at the age of twelve. Having a research background, she naturally turned her attention to finding out as much as she could about how best to combat this terrifying illness. Her son is now fully recovered and has supported this book that not only describes their experiences, but also provides a practical guide on how to cope with male eating disorders.
A much needed resource for other parents in similar situations, the book will also be of interest to people working in health centres, clinics and hospitals. It will also be invaluable for youth support groups, teachers and sports coaching staff, who are often the first to be aware of concerns about eating disorders in young men.

http://rapidgator.net/file/2c3b96d6c64029e316dd7251db274692/Jenny_Langley_-_Boys_Get_Anorexia_Too.pdf.html

Susan Schulherr - Eating disorders for Dummies

Do you think that you or someone you love may suffer from and eating disorder? Eating Disorders For Dummies gives you the straight facts you need to make sense of what’s happening inside you and offers a simple step-by-step procedure for developing a safe and health plan for recovery.
This practical, reassuring, and gentle guide explains anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating disorder in plain English, as well as other disorders such as bigorexia and compulsive exercising. Informative checklists help you determine whether you are suffering form an eating disorder and, if so, what impact the disorder is having or may soon have on your health. You’ll also get plenty of help in finding the right therapist, evaluating the latest treatments, and learning how to support recovery on a day-by-day basis. Complete with helpful lists of recovery dos and don'ts, "Eating Disorders For Dummies" is an immensely important resource for anyone who wants to recover -- or help a loved one recover -- from one of these disabling conditions and regain a healthy and energetic life.




http://rapidgator.net/file/dca338c5b27736381bc6fabc3117c8e2/Susan_Schulherr_-Eating_Disorders_For_Dummies.pdf.html

Jillian Medoff - Hunger point

“It's my brain," she says softly. "It's eating me alive.” 

Twenty-six-year-old Frannie Hunter has just moved back home. Bright, wry, blunt, and irreverent, she invites you to witness her family's unraveling. Her Harvard-bound sister is anorexic, her mother is having an affair, her father is obsessed with the Food Network, her grandfather wants to plan her wedding (even though she has no fiancé, let alone a steady boyfriend), and, to top it off, Frannie is a waitress who wears a dirty duck apron and serves plates of fried cheese to her ex-boyfriend's parents.

This ambitious, ribald, and extremely honest novel attempts to unravel the familial and social pressures that drive two sisters into a life of serious food abuse. One survives, the other doesn't.







http://rapidgator.net/file/a25e092313f79c46fe67ad2574cd7b69/Jillian_Medoff_-_Hunger_Point.pdf.html

Gary A.Grahl - Skinny boy: A Young Man's Battle and Triumph Over Anorexia

Challenging the assumption that anorexia is an exclusively female affliction, this compelling memoir is the first to describe how a young man overcame this often fatal disorder. Handsome and popular, Gary had baseball abilities that had attracted the attention of the big leagues, until a shaming inner-voice convinced him that he needed to be thinner, leading to an out-of-control compulsion to exercise and starve himself, causing multiple hospitalizations. Providing strategies for tackling the recovery process and examples of changes in the thinking needed to take those steps, this important narrative comes at a time when eating disorders are at an all-time high in America, afflicting more than 8 million men. Demonstrating how anyone can win the internal battle between mind and body, this much-needed biography offers therapists, sufferers, and their families with powerful tools to help them triumph over this life and death battle. 


http://rapidgator.net/file/a6e3db4aa5ae2e7554dd5abcc2fa89b0/Gary_Grahl_-_Skinny_Boy._A_Young_Mans_Battle_&_Triumph_Over_Anorexia.pdf.html

Harriet Brown - Brave girl eating: A Family's Struggle with Anorexia

"Even now, I don’t truly understand why Kitty can’t pick up a fork and eat the way she used to, why she is suddenly obsessed with calories and getting fat. She’s never been fat; no one’s ever made fun of her because of her weight. She has always loved to eat. In one of our favorite family stories, Kitty, age four, ordered a huge bowl of mussels in a restaurant one night and devoured them, licking the insides of the shiny dark shells. The chef came out of the kitchen to see the child with the adult palate, and sent out a bowl of chocolate ice cream in appreciation. Which Kitty devoured.

I still don’t understand, but I’m beginning to know. To recognize the sick feeling in my stomach each time we sit down at the table and Kitty does not eat. I’m beginning to be able to predict how each meal will go: Jamie and I will take turns cajoling, pleading, ordering our daughter to eat, and she will turn aside everything we say with the skill of a fencer parrying a lunge. She will eat a few bites of lettuce, a handful of dry ramen noodles. She will count out six grapes and consume them with infinite slowness, peeling each one into strips and sucking it dry. She will pour her milk down the sink when she thinks we’re not looking, allow herself only five sips of water.

And at the end of the meal, she will climb the stairs to her room and do a hundred extra sit-ups, penance for the sin of feeding herself even these scraps. Which would not keep a dog alive.

Which will not keep her alive, either."

In Brave Girl Eating, the chronicle of a family’s struggle with anorexia nervosa, journalist, professor, and author Harriet Brown recounts in mesmerizing and horrifying detail her daughter Kitty’s journey. Brave Girl Eating is an intimate, shocking, compelling, and ultimately uplifting look at the ravages of a mental illness that affects more than 18 million Americans.

http://rapidgator.net/file/d64146b06d9f8d62390c7e013f6ab0f0/Harriet_Brown_-_Brave_Girl_Eating.pdf.html

Portia de Rossi - Unbearable lightness: a story of loss and gain

  “Shame weighs a lot more than flesh and bone.” 

Portia de Rossi weighed only 82 pounds when she collapsed on the set of the Hollywood film in which she was playing her first leading role. This should have been the culmination of all her years of hard work—first as a child model in Australia, then as a cast member of one of the hottest shows on American television. On the outside she was thin and blond, glamorous and successful. On the inside, she was literally dying.
In this searing, unflinchingly honest book, Portia de Rossi captures the complex emotional truth of what it is like when food, weight, and body image take priority over every other human impulse or action. She recounts the elaborate rituals around eating that came to dominate hours of every day, from keeping her daily calorie intake below 300 to eating precisely measured amounts of food out of specific bowls and only with certain utensils. When this wasn’t enough, she resorted to purging and compulsive physical exercise, driving her body and spirit to the breaking point.
Even as she rose to fame as a cast member of the hit television shows Ally McBeal and Arrested Development, Portia alternately starved herself and binged, all the while terrified that the truth of her sexuality would be exposed in the tabloids. She reveals the heartache and fear that accompany a life lived in the closet, a sense of isolation that was only magnified by her unrelenting desire to be ever thinner. With the storytelling skills of a great novelist and the eye for detail of a poet, Portia makes transparent as never before the behaviors and emotions of someone living with an eating disorder.
From her lowest point, Portia began the painful climb back to a life of health and honesty, falling in love with and eventually marrying Ellen DeGeneres, and emerging as an outspoken and articulate advocate for gay rights and women’s health issues.
In this remarkable and beautifully written work, Portia shines a bright light on a dark subject. A crucial book for all those who might sometimes feel at war with themselves or their bodies, Unbearable Lightness is a story that inspires hope and nourishes the spirit.

http://rapidgator.net/file/d65bab627be9359e7dc5c5fec9d36432/(Rossi,_Portia_de)_Unbearable_Lightness.pdf.html

Sheila MacLeod - The Art of Starvation: a story of anorexia and survival

 

In The Art of Starvation Sheila MacLeod tells her own story, the story of one girl growing up - with anorexia nervosa. Hers is the experience of thousands, for anorexia is now so prevalent that one in every two hundred teenage girls is starving herself - possibly to death. But its causes and cures remain controversial and mysterious.

 

The fact is that life for young girls has changed dramatically in the post-Pill age: the choices seem greater, the pressures more contradictory. Sheila MacLeod explores this uncharted territory with skill and subtlety. For her, starvation became the goal of her adolescence and she developed it into an art - her body the weapon she used to fight off helplessness in the face of the impossible demands of 'womanhood'. Basing her book on her diaries, she gives an impassioned account of anorexia as an illness and a state of mind.




http://rapidgator.net/file/dc4bcdc7b819817ffa9e8e78f8043d40/Sheila_Macleod_-_The_art_of_starvation.pdf.html

Marya Hornbacher - Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia

"And the sharp hiss of one voice that started out softly, as though below layers of moss, or flesh, and gradually became so loud it drowned out everything else: Thinner, it said. You've got to get thinner."

"When you coast without eating for a significant amount of time, and you are still alive, you begin to scoff at those fools who believe they must eat to live. It seems blatantly obvious to you that this is not true. You get up in the morning, you do your work, you run, you do not eat, you live." 

Why would a talented young woman enter into a torrid affair with hunger, drugs, sex, and death? Through five lengthy hospital stays, endless therapy, and the loss of family, friends, jobs, and all sense of what it means to be "normal," Marya Hornbacher lovingly embraced her anorexia and bulimia -- until a particularly horrifying bout with the disease in college put the romance of wasting away to rest forever. A vivid, honest, and emotionally wrenching memoir, Wasted is the story of one woman's travels to reality's darker side -- and her decision to find her way back on her own terms.






http://rapidgator.net/file/16b5d763c8b4805783948aeb8122d8df/Wasted__a_memoir_of_anorexia_and_bulimia_-_Marya_Hornbacher.pdf.html

Deborah Hautzig - Second star to the right

“I’ll know when I’m thin enough because I’ll be happy.”

 Leslie Hiller is a bright, attractive, talented teenager who leads a privileged life in New York City. She is also a perfectionist. When Leslie starts to diet, she finds herself becoming obsessed, getting thinner and thinner, until she is forced to realize that her quest for perfection is killing her.












http://rapidgator.net/file/df9a0e43ae4b6af3156caea79476496d/Deborah_Hautzig_Second_star_to_the_right.pdf.html

Steven Levenkron - The best little girl in the world

“From the newsstands a dozen models smiled up at her from a dozen magazine covers, smiled in thin-faced, high-cheekboned agreement to Kessa's new discovery. They knew the secret too. They knew thin was good, thin was strong; thin was safe.”

“Soon I'll be thinner than all of you, she swore to herself. And then I'll be the winner. The thinner is the winner.” 

“How silly people were to eat. They thought they needed food for energy, but they didn't. Energy came from will, from self-control.” 

Kessie thinks she's overweight. She's five foot four and ninety-eight pounds. Kessie has anorexia nervosa.





http://rapidgator.net/file/a35235c6a181139f6683558416064862/Steven_Levenkron_The_best_little_girl_in_the_world.pdf.html

Laurie Halse Anderson - Wintergirls

"I am that girl.
 I am the space between my thights,daylight shining through.
 I am the library aide who hides in Fantasy.
 I am the circus freak encased in beeswax.
I am the bones they want,wired on a porcelain frame."

Lia and Cassie were best friends, wintergirls frozen in matchstick bodies. But now Cassie is dead. Lia’s mother is busy saving other people’s lives. Her father is away on business. Her stepmother is clueless. And the voice inside Lia’s head keeps telling her to remain in control, stay strong, lose more, weigh less. If she keeps on going this way – thin, thinner, thinnest – maybe she’ll disappear altogether.





http://rapidgator.net/file/8ac025a60f889198fc048c7d78ec305d/Laurie_Halse_Anderson_-_Wintergirls.pdf.html