Lived Experiences

Esmé Weijun Wan The Collected Schizophrenias (2019) . Both a memoir of her personal madness, and a startling mosaic of schizo-affective disorder as a shared condition. 

Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995). The pioneering memoir of a psychiatrist’s own manic depression.

Joanne Greenberg, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden(1964). A riveting autobiographical narrative of the author’s descent into the agony of schizophrenia. The book evokes the presence of her voices with exacting linguistic chaos that is authentic and literary. The account of her ultimate recovery is astonishing. A key part of her recovery is that she never disavowed her voices, but rather creatively worked through and transformed them.

Mythology, Mysticism, Indigenous Medicine

Carl Kerenyi, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life. (1976) Less well known than Joseph Campbell today, the author wrote with vision and subtlety regarding the mysteries of the Greek gods. He emphasized less the folk myths – and more the deep structure of place, shrine, ritual and language. Here, he explores Dionysus, god of madness and resurrection.

Carl Kerenyi, Eleusis: Archetypal Image of Mother and Daughter. (1967) Another opus by Carl Kerenyi, which aims to reveal the secrets of the Eleusinian Mysteries, hosted by Demeter, goddess of the grain, and Persephone, the elusive maiden – also Queen of the Underworld. and guardian of the secret of immortal life.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes Ph.D.,Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype.(1992) This book celebrates sacred wildness, in the feminine psyche, but it speaks just as much to men.

Wouter Kusters, A Philosophy of Madness: The Experience of Psychotic Thinking (2013). The author’s opus on his own inner experience of psychosis, its mysteries and intensities, and its deep connections to mysticism. Psychiatry tends to focus on madness as a condition to be managed and medicated. But madness looks very different from the inside, as the beginning of mystery and meaning, rather than the dead-end that the gaze of psychiatry assumes.

Jean Markale, Cathedral of the Black Madonna: The Druids and the Mysteries of Chartres (1988). Jeam Markale wrote extensively and intimately about connections between ancient Druidic mysteries and Christianity, especially the Black Madonna.

SAND Non-duality and Indigenous Mental Health: The films of The Eternal Song (2025-) This is an spectacular, amazing twelve-part documentary about indigenous mental health and healing around the world. In many ways, I can only allude to the ways in which indigenous practices without claiming to speak for them. Here, the film-makers let these healers speak for themselves.

Therapeutic and Sociological Lenses

Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1991) A profound psychoanalytyic and literary exploration of depression, emphasizing maternal themes.

Michel Foucault, A History of Madness. (Originally published 1961) The classic history of how perceptions of madness shifted since medieval times to the modern age, from an unfathomable mystery with religious overtones, to a set of diagnostic conditions to be managed by doctors.

Mental Health Advocacy Groups

Mad In America This organization focuses on critical appraisals of the psychiatric and pharmaceutical frame of over-medicalizing mental illness. It has become a significant forum for alternative positions that stress neurodivergence, power and decoloniality.

The Hearing Voices Network – This organization offers resources for those who hear voices, regardless of their diagnosis. Unlike traditional psychiatric apporaches, these support groups emphasize the importance of creating spaces for those who hear voices to interpret , give meaning to and creatively work with these voices.

NAMI – National Association for Mental Illness. This organization is the pre-emininent mental health advocacy group in the country, They originated as a forum for support of families with schizophrenia, and have evolved into a nexus for families, persons of lived experience, doctors, care providers and policymakers to ally on mental health social justice and support.