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If you loved
Books like Mad in America
A sobering, meticulously researched indictment of the psychiatric establishment that will leave you questioning everything you know about mental healthcare. These 12 books are the closest matches in mood, pace and themes, with what each one shares with Mad in America.
- sobering
- disturbing
- heavy
- thought-provoking
- 01
A Mind That Found Itself
Clifford Whittingham Beers · 1908
A lucid, harrowing dispatch from the depths of early twentieth-century psychiatric confinement that transforms personal suffering into a rallying cry for reform.
- 02
An unquiet mind
Kay Redfield Jamison · 1995
A fiercely articulate descent into the terrifying highs and crushing lows of a brilliant, fractured mind.
- 03
Bad Pharma: How Medicine is Broken, and How We Can Fix it
Ben Goldacre
A meticulously researched, infuriatingly compelling teardown of the medical-industrial complex that will permanently alter how you view a prescription pad.
- 04
Hidden Valley Road
Robert Kolker
A devastating and deeply humane portrait of a family consumed by an invisible illness, intertwined with the medical quest to understand it.
- 05
Crazy like us
Ethan Watters
A paradigm-shifting journey that dismantles everything you thought you knew about the universality of the human mind.
- 06
The Brain That Changes Itself
Norman Doidge
An awe-inspiring exploration of human resilience that will fundamentally change how you view your own mind's potential.
- 07
The Psychopath Test
Jon Ronson
A darkly funny, slightly paranoid plunge into the blurry line between eccentricity and clinical madness.
- 08
The Center Cannot Hold
Elyn R. Saks · 2007
A beautifully written, harrowing, and ultimately triumphant firsthand account of navigating the terrifying realities of schizophrenia.
- 09
The Shock of the Fall
Nathan Filer
A raw, immersive plunge into the turbulent and spinning reality of mental illness.
- 10
The Female Malady
Showalter, Elaine; Showalter, E. · 1985
A chilling, meticulously researched exploration of how the medical establishment weaponized madness to control women.
- 11
A first-rate madness
S. Nassir Ghaemi
A provocative and analytical exploration that reframes mental illness as a profound asset in times of historical crisis.
- 12
Lost connections
Johann Hari
A deeply validating, journalistic journey that reframes our deepest psychological pains as a rational response to a disconnected world.
