On Our Mind: Nonfiction

Lori Gottlieb is a psychotherapist. In addition to her clinical practice, she writes the Atlantic's weekly "Dear Therapist" advice column and contributes regularly to the New York Times. She is on the Advisory Council for Bring Change to Mind and has appeared in media such as the Today Show, Good Morning America, the CBS Early Show, CNN, and NPR's Fresh Air. Gottlieb is the New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, HER Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), which is being adapted as a television series with Eva Longoria. In a starred review, Kirkus calls it, “An irresistibly addictive tour of the human condition." One day, Lori Gottlieb is a therapist who helps patients in her Los Angeles practice. The next, a crisis causes her world to come crashing down. Enter Wendell, the quirky but seasoned therapist in whose of­fice she suddenly lands. With his balding head, cardigan, and khakis, he seems to have come straight from Therapist Central Casting. Yet he will turn out to be anything but. With startling wisdom and humor, Gottlieb invites us into her world as both clinician and patient, examining the truths and fictions we tell ourselves and others as we teeter on the tightrope between love and desire, meaning and mortality, guilt and redemption, terror and courage, hope and change.

Susannah Cahalan is the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, a memoir about her struggle with a rare autoimmune disease of the brain. She writes for the New York Post. Her work has also been featured in the New York Times, Scientific American Magazine, Glamour, Psychology Today, and other publications. Her latest book, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness (Grand Central Publishing) is a propulsive narrative history investigating the 50-year-old mystery behind a dramatic experiment that changed the course of modern medicine. For centuries, doctors have struggled to define mental illness--how do you diagnose it, how do you treat it, how do you even know what it is? In search of an answer, in the 1970s a Stanford psychologist named David Rosenhan and seven other people--sane, normal, well-adjusted members of society--went undercover into asylums around America to test the legitimacy of psychiatry's labels. Forced to remain inside until they'd "proven" themselves sane, all eight emerged with alarming diagnoses and even more troubling stories of their treatment.  But, as Cahalan's explosive new research shows, very little in this saga is exactly as it seems. What really happened behind those closed asylum doors, and what does it mean for our understanding of mental illness today?