Nearly half of all Americans live with some type of chronic illness, according to the National Health Council. If that stat sounds bigger than you thought, it’s probably because one of the worst parts of having an ongoing disease is how isolated it can make you feel. As soon as you get your diagnosis and the reality of how your life will change sets in, you may start to feel like your world is shrinking in around you. But there are more people than you know who understand very well just how you are feeling. Whether you’re currently afflicted or are simply interested in learning more about these experiences, these 6 books are sure to quell your curiosity.
Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan
Twenty-four-year-old journalist Cahalan’s ordeal begins with uncharacteristic forgetfulness, paranoia and mood swings. Soon she’s hospitalized, lost to violent seizures, hallucinations and blackouts while her loved ones pursue diagnosis. Following life-saving treatment for a rare form of encephalitis, she turns her investigative eye to the episode, searching for the events and medical facts comprising her missing month of life, and answers about how one’s identity can be lost, and found.
The Tiger and the Cage by Emma Bolden
Bolden’s debilitating physical pain began with menstruation and persisted beyond her hysterectomy – which was supposed to relieve it. Interweaving vivid glimpses of her life from puberty to present day with medical-history vignettes, she examines the nature of her aggressive endometriosis, the dire side effects of prescribed treatments, and the roots of institutional misogyny in western medicine that still hamper diagnosis and treatment today.
Emerging from the Dark by Terence Ang
In his first book, Crying in the Dark, Terence Ang tells the powerful story, amid great angst, of his journey to rediscover and reclaim his voice, his dignity, and emerge stronger after suffering a stroke in 2020. Now Ang has taken the crusade a step further in his second book, Emerging From the Dark, in which he has compiled a collection of real, revealing and uplifting, and at the same time disturbing stories from people in various stages of stroke recovery — what they experience and how they feel.
Read the review on BookTrib and check out this interview with the author.
The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang
An intimate, moving book written with the immediacy and directness of one who still struggles with the effects of mental and chronic illness, The Collected Schizophrenias cuts right to the core. 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 of schizophrenia in her life.
My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread and the Search for Peace of Mind by Scott Stossel
This book is a riveting, revelatory, and moving account of the author’s struggles with anxiety, and of the history of efforts by scientists, philosophers, and writers to understand the condition. As recently as thirty-five years ago, anxiety did not exist as a diagnostic category. Today, it is the most common form of officially classified mental illness. Scott Stossel gracefully guides us across the terrain of an affliction that is pervasive yet too often misunderstood.
The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Megan O’Rourke
A silent epidemic of chronic illnesses afflicts tens of millions of Americans: these are diseases that are poorly understood, frequently marginalized, and can go undiagnosed and unrecognized altogether. Renowned writer Meghan O’Rourke delivers a revelatory investigation into this elusive category of “invisible” illness that encompasses autoimmune diseases, post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome, and now long COVID, synthesizing the personal and the universal to help all of us through this new frontier.
