Elyn Saks (2007). The Centre Cannot Hold: A Memoir of My Schizophrenia. Memoir by this professor of Law and Psychiatry at University of Southern California Law School, who has also written philosophically on psychoanalysis (amongst other things).
Lara Jefferson (1975). These are my sisters: A journal from the inside of insanity. Gollancz.
Pamela Spiro Wagner & Carolyn E. Spiro (2006). Divided Minds. Griffin. Twin sisters, one becomes a 'psychiatrist' and the other becomes a 'schizophrenic'.
William L. Moore. (1955). The Mind in Chains: The autobiography of a schizophrenic. New York: Exposition Press.
Manic Depression / Bipolar Disorder
Kay Redfield Jamison (1996). An Unquiet Mind London: Picador.
Morag Coate (1964), Beyond all Reason, with an introduction by R. D. Laing. London: Constable. (As noted by J K Aronson, Coate's tale is more reminiscent of bipolar disorder than of the 'schizophrenia' diagnosis reported by Laing.)
Millett, Kate (1991). Loony-Bin Trip. London: Virago Press Ltd.
The journal Schizophrenia Bulletin is freely available (apart from the current year which requires a subscription). Many issues contain a 'Personal Account' written by someone suffering with schizophrenia.
There are many educational video clips of or by people with mental health difficulties on youtube. It is not clear whether the patients in these have given, or could give, their consent to these videos being publicly shown.
Angelhaunt. The website of author and 'schizophrenic' Jason Stuart Ratcliff. Ratcliff provides us not only with his poetic, prosaic, and artistic creations, but also with two written pieces on his experience of living with schizophrenia, one of which is available as a book. Ratcliff train a philosophical eye on the experience of schizophrenia, developing ideas of schizophrenia as a failure of socialisation and common sense which are similar to those of the phenomenological psychopathologist Giovanni Stanghellini.
Spiritual Recovery and Spritual Emergency. Two blogs by the same author, which collect first-person accounts by various authors of their experience of psychotic conditions, sometimes interpreted by these authors as spiritual transformations.
If you have ideas for a new list, or have references that you wish to add to one of the displayed lists, please email .
. Memoir by this professor of Law and Psychiatry at University of Southern California Law School, who has also written philosophically on psychoanalysis (amongst other things).
. London: Sphere Books Ltd.
. New York: Grune & Stratton.
Memoirs of my Nervous Illness. History's most famous 'schizophrenic'. This case has inspired commentaries by Sigmund Freud
, Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
, Elias Canetti, Jacques Lacan, Zvi Lothane
, Morton Schatzman
, and Louis Sass
amongst others.
Harmondsworth: Pelican.
. Griffin. Twin sisters, one becomes a 'psychiatrist' and the other becomes a 'schizophrenic'.
New York: Simon & Schuster.
London: Picador.
, with an introduction by R. D. Laing. London: Constable. (As noted by J K Aronson, Coate's tale is more reminiscent of bipolar disorder than of the 'schizophrenia' diagnosis reported by Laing.)
. London: Virago Press Ltd.
. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
London: Chatto and Windus.
London: Jonathan Cape Ltd.
London: Souvenir Press Ltd,
. Time Warner International.
London: Virago Books.
. London: Virago.
