5 fascinating psychiatry books for your summer reading

Philip Zimbardo, PhD, is the creator of the Stanford Prison Experiment, where a group of college students were put in a mock prison environment and randomly separated into groups of guards and prisoners.

This landmark study was terminated within a week because the students transformed into broken prisoners and sadistic guards. In the book, Zimbardo provides a detailed account of his study, and delves into the forces that drive good people to act in an immoral manner.

He calls this transformation of human character the “Lucifer Effect,” named for Lucifer, an angel who fell from grace and eventually became the devil. The book draws on examples from history as well as the author’s own research.

Read The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, by Philip G. Zimbardo

Nana-Ama Danquah is a Black single mother who immigrated to the US at the age of 6 from Ghana. She is a performance artist and poet who’s worked as a creative writing instructor.

In her memoir, Danquah details her journey through episodes of overwhelming depression and despair. She shares her unique perspective as an African American woman who suffers from depression. She candidly discusses her parents’ divorce, and the rage she felt towards her father for abandoning her.

The book details other harrowing ordeals Danquah has faced, such as being sexually assaulted by her mother’s lover. Ultimately, with the help of therapists as well as meditation, music, and self-monitoring, the author was able to overcome these traumatic experiences.

Read Willow Weep for Me: A Black Woman’s Journey Through Depression, by Nana-Ama Danquah

As a child, Howard Dully was difficult. He smoked, lied, stole, and was constantly getting in trouble at school. His father and stepmother took him to psychiatrist Walter Freeman, MD, who performed a transorbital lobotomy to cure him of his psychological problems.

For most of his life, Dully wanted to understand why his father and stepmother took him to Freeman, who believed lobotomy was cure for all personality disorders. This drove him to retrieve and study his own medical records, and Freeman’s notes are extensively quoted in this book.

While Dully (now a bus driver with a wife and two sons) never found out the reason, he realized his life’s greatest misfortune was not his lobotomy, but rather being raised by parents who were incapable of showing love.

Read My Lobotomy: A Memoir, by Howard Dully and Charles Fleming

Lori Gottlieb is a psychotherapist who started seeing a therapist herself while going through tough personal circumstances. In her book, she talks about her clients such as an elderly woman wanting to end her life on and a newlywed diagnosed with a terminal disease.

She ultimately discovered the questions her clients struggled with are the same ones she presented to her therapist. This was ranked among Amazon’s 10 best books of the year and is currently being developed as a TV series.

Read Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, by Lori Gottlieb

Marya Hornbacher, an only child of a troubled marriage, was bulimic by age 9 and suffered from anorexia by 15. She was hospitalized repeatedly during high school but went on to study for a short time at American University.

She reached a critical moment in her life when her weight decreased to 52 pounds and doctors only gave her a week to live. In her book (written at age 23, and since revised), she details her struggles with eating disorders, which she believes are as much a biochemical addiction as a psychological disorder.

Read Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia, by Marya Hornbacher