The Best Books on Losing It

by Katya Cengel
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5 books
The following books are not about eating disorders, mental illness or addiction necessarily but instead about the ways we all fall apart, big and small. These nonfiction titles chronicle how individuals have rebelled within their bodies and minds, sometimes in ways they can control, sometimes in ways they can’t. Stories of human downfalls, for lack of a better word, say as much about the subjects as about the societies in which they live.
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Strangers to Ourselves

Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us
Rachel Aviv, 2022
Rachel Aviv starts by explaining that she starved herself at age six. By her own account Aviv’s flirtation with an eating disorder is short lived, but another patient she meets during her brief hospitalization faces a different fate. What sets their outcomes apart is just one aspect Aviv explores in this collection of true stories about people who have broken from society in a variety of ways. I chose this book because of the way Aviv approaches the stories of the individuals she writes about as a journalist and not a doctor.

Hidden Valley Road

Inside the Mind of an American Family
Robert Kolker, 2020
Robert Kolker tells the story of one American family in which six of the family’s ten boys were diagnosed as schizophrenic. I was fascinated by the family dynamics Kolker explores as well as the treatment changes over time that impacted the outcome of each of the brothers.

The Great Pretender

The Undercover Mission that Changed our Understanding of Madness
Susannah Cahalan, 2020
A trained journalist, Susannah Cahalan delves into the history of mental illness treatment, focusing on the studies of one Stanford psychologist and his team in the 1970s. Having been hospitalized in the psychosomatic ward at Stanford Children’s Hospital at age ten I was interested to learn more about a past Stanford psychologist’s very questionable methods.

Girl, Interrupted

Susanna Kaysen, 2013
Susanna Kaysen was 18 when she was sent to a hospital psychiatric ward for young women in 1967. She spent two years there. The vivid descriptions of those institutionalized as well as Kaysen’s own internal turmoil are what captivated my attention.

It's Kind of a Funny Story

Ned Vizzini, 2010
Although the book is fictional, it was inspired by Ned Vizzini’s brief hospitalization for depression as a teenager in a psychiatric hospital. Through his fictional character, Vizzini describes the other patients on the psych unit and some of the absurdly comic things that happen there. It is this dark humor that pulled me in.