Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness characterized by incoherent or illogical thoughts, bizarre behaviour and speech, and delusions or hallucinations. Schizophrenia typically begins in young adulthood, and causes can be due to genetics, environment, and psychological and social processes. Delusions are beliefs that usually involve a misinterpretation of perceptions or experiences. Schizophrenia is a treatable illness, like many other types of...

"Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom. There was a script for a family like the Galvins--hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony--and they all tried to play their parts. But behind the closed doors of the house on Hidden Valley Road was a far different reality: psychological breakdown,...

"An outcast her entire life, Corvina Clemm is left adrift after losing her mother. When she receives the admission letter from the mysterious University of Verenmore, she accepts it as a sign from the universe. The last thing she expects though is an old, secluded castle on top of a mountain riddled with secrets, deceit, and death. An enigma his entire life, Vad Deverell likes being a closed book but knowing exactly everything that happens in the...

"When the Rosens moved to New Rochelle in 1973, Jonathan Rosen and Michael Laudor seemed destined to become inseparable. The boys, both children of college professors, grew up on the same street in intellectually vibrant homes shaped by ideas, liberal Jewish culture, the trauma of the Holocaust, and a shared love of basketball and standup comedy. But the two best friends were also keen competitors bearing the same great expectations, and when Michael...

After decades in institutions, a man with schizophrenia faces violence and death to live on his own. In collaboration with ProPublica, an investigation into a court-ordered effort to move those with mental illness into independent living.

"Vince Granata remembers standing in front of his suburban home in Connecticut the day his mother and father returned from the hospital with his three new siblings in tow. He had just finished scrawling their names in orange chalk on the driveway: Christopher, Timothy, and Elizabeth. Twenty-three years later, Vince was a thousand miles away when he received shocking news that would change his life-his younger brother, Tim, propelled by unchecked schizophrenia,...

"Meet Kevin Hall, brother, son, husband, father, and Olympic and America's Cup sailor. Kevin has an Ivy League degree, a winning smile, and throughout his adult life, he has been engaged in an ongoing battle with a person that doesn't exist to anyone but him: the Director. Kevin suffers from what doctors are beginning to call the 'Truman Show' delusion, a form of psychosis named for the 1998 movie, where the main character is trapped as the star of...

"A daughter's quest to understand her charismatic and troubled father, an immigrant who crosses borders both real and illusory--between sanity and madness, science and spirituality, life and death. ¿Papi, dónde estás? Throughout Jean Guerrero's childhood, her father, Marco Antonio, was an erratic and elusive presence. A self-taught genius at fixing, creating, and conjuring things--and capable of transforming himself into a shaman, dreamcaster,...

"Don't Go Crazy without Me tells the tragicomic coming of age story of a girl who grew up under the seductive sway of her outrageously eccentric father. He taught her how to have fun; he also taught her to fear food poisoning, other children's infectious diseases, and the contaminating propensities of the world at large. Alienated from her emotionally distant mother, she bonded closely with her father and his worldview. When he plunged from neurotic...

"Schizophrenia is not a single unifying diagnosis, and Esmé Weijun Wang writes not just to her fellow members of the 'collected schizophrenias' but to those who wish to understand it as well. Opening with the journey toward her diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, Wang discusses the medical community's own disagreement about labels and procedures for diagnosing those with mental illness, and then follows an arc that examines the manifestations...