We recommend the following links, books & magazines, and movies and documentaries for individuals seeking to learn more about overcoming mental illness.

Links

Click on the name to visit the site.

• World Health Organization (mental disorders page)
• National Institute of Mental Health
• Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration
• American Psychological Association
• American Psychiatric Association
• National Alliance on Mental Illness
• National Partnership for Workplace Mental Health
• National Mental Health Association
• National Empowerment Center
• The Center for Reintegration
• Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance
• American Foundation of Suicide Prevention
• National Asian American Pacific Islander Mental Health Association
• ADS Center – Resource Center to Address Stigma and Discrimination
• Depression Hurts – But You Don’t Have To
• Lichtenstein Creative Media
• National Association for Mentally Ill - India
• Center for Advocacy in Mental Health - India
• Action for Mental Illness - India
• Richmond Fellowship Society - IndiaThe Banyan - India
• Schizophrenia Awareness Association - India

Books

A Beautiful Mind
If you've seen the movie, read the book. Both received NAMI Special Awards in 2002 for the Greatest Contribution to Public Education About Mental illness. The biography of Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash charts a path of struggle and recovery from schizophrenia.

Nature Lessons: A Novel
Winner of one of NAMI's 2003 Literary Awards. A woman returns to South Africa to search for her missing mother and truths about her family under apartheid. It explores the paranoia that can be rooted either in mental illness or an oppressive political regime. What is "real" and what is "paranoid" may be confused or depend on a person's class or racial perspective, and their impact affects a child's past, present, and future.

Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories From A Decade Gone Mad
Winner of one of NAMI's 2003 Literary Awards. One year after Patty Hearst was kidnapped and robbed a bank in 1974, the author writes, "my mother lost her mind and kidnapped my sister and me to our family cottage in rural, coastal Virginia. " She believed they had been inducted into a secret army. "Trusted with setting up a field hospital, we lived in that cottage for over three years. " Written from the perspective of an adult child of a parent with mental illness, it explores how relatives, neighbors and the medical and legal systems failed to provide the help they needed.

I Know This Much Is True
An epic novel covering three dysfunctional generations. A 40 year-old man whose twin has schizophrenia struggles with issues of identity, emotion, alienation, and renewal. His twin is both sympathetic and significant in offering perspective on events. Dramatic tension is mixed with humor and a reasonably happy ending.

Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke and
A Brilliant Madness: Living with Manic-Depressive Illness
One book tells actress Patty Duke's story while the other shares information about bipolar disorder, based on her first-hand experience. Read separately or together.

9 Highland Road: Sane Living for the Mentally Ill
A non-fiction account of a group home in Glen Cove, New York, including intimate portraits of the resident, their crises and therapy as well as the ignorance and fears of wealthy neighbors in the community who tried to prevent the home from opening. The author is a reporter for The New York Times and winner of the 1999 NAMI Outstanding Media Award for investigative reporting.

Undercurrents: A Life Beneath the Surface
A psychologist's highly readable memoir of her year-long descent and recovery from depression--including electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Marked by wit, candor, irony and hope. Not many books about depression cause a reader to laugh out loud -- while also feeling the author's pain -- but this one does.

Community Mental Health: Challenges for the 21st Century
The Community Mental Health Reader is an interdisciplinary resource for students preparing to become mental health professionals, those functioning as practitioners in community mental health settings or policy planners engaged in the evaluation and development of programs in the human services. Drs. Samuel and Jessica Rosenberg seek to clarify the issues surrounding community mental health.

Other Book Recommendations:

• Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression, by Neil Casey
• An Unquiet Mind, by Kay Redfield Jamison
• Don't Call Me Nuts: Coping with the Stigma of Mental Illness, by Patrick Corrigan and Robert Lundin
• Imagining Robert: My Brother, Madness and Survival, by Jay Neugeboren
• Transforming Madness: New Lives for People Living with Mental Illness, by Jay Neugeboren
• The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness, by Lori Schiller and Amanda Bennett
• The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, by Andrew Solomon
• The Day the Voices Stopped: A Journey from Madness to Hope, by Ken Steele and Claire Berman
• Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, by William Styron
• Telling is Risky Business: The Experience of Mental Illness Stigma, by Otto F. Wahl

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Magazines

• The Advocate is NAMI's quarterly newsmagazine, featuring cutting-edge articles about the latest research, treatments, and services for mental illnesses; the status of major policy and legislation at the federal, state, and local levels; and provocative editorials and columns. It brings you the kind of timely, practical information you need, whether you are a consumer, a family member, or a friend of person with a serious mental illness.
  
• Reintegration Today magazine is published quarterly by the Center for Reintegration as an information resource and community forum for people interested in all aspects of severe mental illness, particularly the process of recovery and reintegration back into society.
• Mental Health Works is a free quarterly publication focused on mental health in the workplace (www.workplacementalhealth.org/mentalhealthworks).
• Bp is the healthy living magazine for those with bipolar disorder (www.bphope.com).
• Schizophrenia Digest is dedicated to sufferers, relatives, caregivers, and professionals in the field (www.schizophreniadigest.com).

Movies

A Beautiful Mind
If you've read the book, see the movie. Both received NAMI Special Awards in 2002 for the Greatest Contribution to Public Education About Mental illness. The biography of Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash charts a path of struggle and recovery from schizophrenia. The Academy Award winning movie is changing public perceptions of mental illness forever.

The Hours
Winner of NAMI's 2003 Oustanding Media Award for a Dramatic Motion Picture; Nicole Kidman received an Academy Award for her performance as Virginia Woolf. An authentic, balanced, although tragic portrayal of mental illness, emphasizing individual dignity and the element of choice in embracing life.

The Caveman's Valentine
Winner of NAMI's 2001 Outstanding Media Award for a Dramatic Motion Picture (starring Samuel L. Jackson). Even before A Beautiful Mind, this was the movie that achieved a breakthrough in its heroic portrayal of a man with schizophrenia who solves a murder mystery. It also contrasts with the A Beautiful Mind in the method through which schizophrenia is portrayed.

Devrai
A film that demystifies schizophrenia, a mental disorder, giving it a human face. The film operates on the simple theme of a family coming to terms with the disease and learning to live with it, realizing that the disease is not curable, but can be controlled with medication. There is no permanent solution to it, only momentary reprieves…

15 Park Avenue
The story of a mind which believes in happiness with such insurmountable faith that it creates that happiness away from the broken life that its reality can offer, where it can remain untouched, pristine and eternal. This film was met with critical acclaim from critics all over India, and received a National Award in 2006.

My Sister's Keeper
Winner of NAMI's 2001 Oustanding Media Award for a Television Movie, starring Kathy Bates and Elizabeth Perkins. It offers an uplifting, non-stereotyped view of a person with mental illness and an at times difficult, but loving relationship with her sister. Based on the book My Sister's Keeper: Learning to Cope with A Sibling's Mental Illness.

Nobody's Child
In this Emmy-winning role, Marlo Thomas (That Girl) portrays Marie Balter. Abandoned as an infant, Balter, endures abuse and neglect by her foster parents. Suffering from sever panic disorder, she is misdiagnosed with schizophrenia at age 17 and confined to a mental institution for 20 years.

A heart-wrenching true story about the survival of the human spirit, Nobodys’s Child follows Balter’s struggle to overcome impossible odds and build a normal life. Her inspiring journey from tragedy to triumph takes her to the halls of Harvard University and back to the mental institution of her youth to champion the cause of the mentally ill.

Documentaries

Shadow Voices: Finding Hope in Mental Illness
An hour-long documentary dealing with stigma, recovery and hope regarding mental illness. The program offers an inside look at what it is like to live with a mental illness and how individuals and their families find their way through a morass of  medical, governmental, societal and spiritual issues. Ten persons from across the U.S. and many sectors of the population with mental illness tell their stories, plus experts and advocates in the field add perspectives and insights.

Out of the Shadow
This very personal documentary chronicles the filmmaker’s mother, Millie, who has schizophrenia, as she suffers through the chaos of our mental health system as well as that of her own mind. A story of madness and dignity, shame and love, this intimate film illuminates a national plight through one family’s struggle and helps dispel the stigmas and misconceptions surrounding this harrowing illness.

West 47th Street
Life on the streets of New York City for the poor and homeless is an unforgiving struggle. For those who also battle mental illness, it is marked by the additional pressures of fear, isolation and misunderstanding. "West 47th Street," a remarkable new film, takes its cameras into the heart of the struggle as it rejects the invisibility of the mentally ill who inhabit America's urban streets. Filmed over three years at Fountain House, a renowned 50-year-old rehabilitation center in New York, "West 47th Street" reveals the human face of mental illness — and the faith and courage with which its victims fight to recover control of their lives.

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