The author reveals how, shortly after giving birth to a child she adored, she drank herself into the same numbness that nearly devoured her charismatic but troubled mother, reaching the brink of suicide before a spiritual awakening led her to sobriety.

The Madness of Mary Lincoln is the first examination of Mary Lincoln's mental illness based on the lost letters, and the first new interpretation of the insanity case in twenty years. This compelling story of the purported insanity of one of America's most tragic first ladies provides new and previously unpublished materials, including the psychiatric diagnosis of Mary's mental illness and her lost will. This book reveals Abraham Lincoln's understanding...

"Written in 1927 but barred from timely publication by the Lincoln family, this book is based on nearly two dozen intimate letters written between Mary Lincoln and her close friend Myra Bradwell mainly during the former's 1875 incarceration in an insane asylum [in Batavia, Illinois]. By the 1920s most accounts of Mrs. Lincoln focused on her negative qualities and dismissed her as "crazy." Bradwell's granddaughter Myra Helmer Pritchard wrote this distinctly...

45 million Americans suffer from mental illness. Ten people with mental illness tell their stories, plus experts and advocates in the field add perspectives and insights, offering an inside look at what it is like to live with a mental illness and how individuals and their families find their way through medical, governmental, societal and spiritual issues.