Mental Health Memoirs: Anxiety-Related Disorders

"This film takes us inside the walls of Renfrew Center, a residential facility for the treatment of women with eating disorders, closely following four young women who have spent their lives starving themselves - often to the verge of death." - Van Wylen Library

"Why would a talented young girl go through the looking glass and step into a netherworld where food is greed, death is honor, and flesh is weak? In this vivid, emotionally wrenching memoir, Wasted is the story of one woman's travels to the darker side of reality, and her decision to find her way back—on her own terms." - Barnes and Noble

"For a girl growing up in Beverly Hills in 1978, the motto “You can never be too rich or too thin” is writ large. So when Lori Gottlieb is told that “real women don’t eat dessert” and “no one could ever like a girl who has thunder thighs,” she decides to become a paragon of dieting. Stick Figure takes the reader on a gripping journey, as Lori struggles to reclaim both her body and her spirit." - Simon and Schuster

"Now the most commonly acknowledged form of mental illness, anxiety wasn't even a diagnostic category 30 years ago. Scott Stossel draws on his own battle with anxiety as he blends historical accounts with a discussion of anxiety's treatments; biological, cultural, and environmental factors." - Library Journal

"Daniel Smith explores what it means both to be momentarily anxious and to suffer from long-term anxiety. He understands that the same impulse that causes humans to run from wolves can also cause them -- and those surrounding them -- immense pain. His intelligent and amusing memoir traces anxiety's intellectual history and its influence on contemporary America." - Library Journal

"'Obsessive-compulsive disorders foster a strange relationship with one's body. You're constantly coming after it with tweezers and anti-bacterials." While describing her attempts to function normally, author Jennifer Traig constructs a narrative that will make readers laugh aloud." - Library Journal

"David Adam has suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder for twenty years, and The Man Who Couldn’t Stop is his unflinchingly honest attempt to understand the condition with a blend of science, history, and memoir." - Barnes and Noble

"When Bailey was a child, she created an imaginary friend that lived inside her head to cope with what she later found out was obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Bailey continuously obsessed over the things she'd done that might be bad, and only by performing a set of routines could she make up for her behavior. As Bailey became a young adult, her OCD spiraled out of control and she had to find ways to cope with her fractured thinking." - Library Journal