Books I love!!!

Okay, so everyone pretty much knows that I love learning about mental illness. So, here is my list of books I love (most of them have to do with DID/MPD).

~First Person Plural: It’s an autobiography of a man with 25+ personalities caused by incestuous sexual abuse. His story starts from his discovery and hardships with the disorder and he relates how he overcomes his denial and faces his strange and frightening reality of being a multiple. He goes on to study psychology intensely and get a phD. This is one of the most gripping, intense, and interesting books I’ve ever read and I recommend it highly.

~Flock: I personally think this book received better reviews that deserved. Although I do admit that this book was an easy read (for the most part), if you’ve read other books on DID, this is pretty much the same-o, same-o. The relationship she had with her therapist is rather unrealistic unless you’re thinking of a therapist without strong boundaries. I have a therapist whom I can contact whenever I need to, but I would never go to their home. The thing that made this book just plain boring was all of the journal pages. Now, I know that I’m talking as a multiple, so I do suppose that the journal pages might be interesting to people who just want to learn about it. But book after book of MPD, this one doesn’t stand out from the rest. Just this multiple’s view.

~Get Me Out of Here: A book about Borderline Personality Disorder. As the 29-year old accountant, wife, and mother of young children would soon discover, it was the diagnosis that finally explained her explosive anger, manipulative behaviors, and self-destructive episodes- including bouts of anorexia, substance abuse, and sexual promiscuity. With astonishing honesty, Reiland's memoir reveals what mental illness feels like and looks like from the inside, and how healing from such a devastating disease is possible through intensive therapy and the support of loved ones.

~Redeeming Love: This book is NOT about mental illness. But it is fabulous!!! I cried (yes, really cried) while reading this book. Even though it is quite long, I read it in 2 days! I couldn't put it down. Redeeming Love opens with the Gold Rush of 1850 and its rough-and-tumble atmosphere of greed and desire. Angel, who was sold into prostitution as a child, has learned to distrust all men, who see her only as a way to satisfy their lust. When the virtuous and spiritual-minded Michael Hosea is told by God to marry this "soiled dove," he obeys, despite his misgivings. As Angel learns to love him, she begins to hope again but is soon overwhelmed by fear and returns to her old life. Rivers shines in her ability to weave together spiritual themes and sexual tension in a well-told story, a talent that has propelled her into the spotlight as one of the most popular novelists in the genre of Christian fiction. This is one of her best.

~Prozac Nation: Though this book offers little insight into the malady and it's treatment, Elizabeth Wurtzel writes of her own personal experiences with depression throughout college in a somewhat compelling and intriguing way. The book doesn't set out to make any real mind-altering points, or change anyone's opinion in any way, it merely tells "only a small personal tale of one person's mental [anguish]."

~A Bright Red Scream: The most startling revelation I experienced while reading this book - which is a page turner in and of itself - is that I had the impression that I was somehow unique and special in the fact that I was a self-mutilator (because it is such a personal method of self-expression often shrouded in cultivated secrecy and privacy on the part of the self-mutilator) and that I managed to overcome my urges by finally learning how to feel my feelings and address my issues in healthier ways as "normal" people do. This book, however, made me realize that it was almost formula pre-destiny based on the circumstances of my upbringing that would serve as the basis and foundation for the ways I acted out down the road in my teenage years. I was left with the sense that, given all the criteria of what makes a injurer an injurer, I almost had no choice but to do what I did in order to survive and cope - and the act IS a form of survival and coping when you are given the message while growing up that control and perfection is crucial and any overt, yet healthy and normal, form of emotional expression is not okay for whatever reason.