"Raising a child or teenager with a psychological condition is a "perfect storm" of stress, sadness, and uncertainty. How can you find the best treatments and help your child overcome emotional, behavioral, and academic challenges -- while keeping yourself and your family strong? As a parent, you may feel isolated and alone, but the reality is that a lot of families are in the same boat. Ann Douglas knows firsthand just how daunting it can be....

"The story of a family whose single mom, fighting mental illness, slowly becomes unable to raise her family, told from the perspective of each of the three children. As the novel opens, a mother drives her eldest son Walter from their home in Los Angeles to the University of California at Berkeley. It will be her last fully responsible act before breaking down completely and being committed to a mental hospital, leaving her children behind. Holding...

"From award-winning journalist Meg Kissinger, a searing memoir of a family besieged by mental illness, as well as an incisive exploration of the systems that failed them and a testament to the love that sustained them. Growing up in the 1960s in the suburbs of Chicago, Meg Kissinger's family seemed to live a charmed life. With eight kids and two loving parents, the Kissingers radiated a warm, boisterous energy. Whether they were spending summer days...

Charles Watkins, a professor of Classics at Cambridge University, has suffered a breakdown. Confined to a mental hospital as his friends and doctors attempt to bring him back to reality, Watkins has embarked on a tremendous psychological adventure that takes him from a spinning raft in the Atlantic to a ruined stone city on a tropical island to an outer-space journey through singing planets. As he travels in his mind through memory and the farther...

Best known for the 1892 title story of this collection, a harrowing tale of a woman's descent into madness, Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote more than 200 other short stories. Seven of her finest are reprinted here.
Written from a feminist perspective, often focusing on the inferior status accorded to women by society, the tales include "Turned," an ironic story with a startling twist, in which a husband seduces and impregnates a naïve servant;

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On a savage, storm-lashed night, Michael Hrubek - a dangerously paranoid schizophrenic - escapes from a mental hospital for the criminally insane by impersonating a dead man. He's on a mission - to find Lis Atcheson, the woman whose testimony identified him as the gruesome Indian Leap State Park murderer. He'll stalk her all the way home, where she waits in the cool autumn night ... surrounded by her past. For Lis, the chief witness at Hrubek's trial,...

After being raised by her grandmother, Caroline returns to Hawaii to find out what happened on the day her parents died.

One rainy afternoon, a stranger breaks into author Martin Stillwater's house, accusing Martin of stealing his wife, his children-and his life. Claiming to be the real Martin Stillwater, the intruder threatens to take what is rightfully his. The police think he's a figment of Martin's imagination. But Martin and his family have no choice but to believe the stranger's threat. And run for their lives.

Pepper is a rambunctious big man, and, suddenly, the surprised inmate of a budget-strapped mental institution in Queens, New York. He's not mentally ill, but that doesn't seem to matter. On his first night, he's visited by a terrifying creature who nearly kills him before being hustled away by the hospital staff. It's no delusion: The other patients confirm that a hungry devil roams the hallways when the sun goes down. Pepper rallies three other inmates...

"Gilly Soloman has been reduced to a mothering machine, taking care of everyone and everything except herself. But the machine has broken down. Burnt out by the endless days of crying children and menial tasks, and exhausted from always putting herself last, Gilly doesn't immediately consider the consequences when she's carjacked. With a knife to her throat, her first thought is that she'll finally get some rest. Someone can save her for a change....