Independent Practitioner/Spring 2005  

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Top Rated Autobiographies in Mental Health

People love personal, compelling stories of self-transformation. Autobiographies provide an inside view of life’s problems, drawing on the human capacity for self-description and self-analysis. Memoirs complement research and case studies performed from the outside looking in. Written in the person’s own words, an autobiography emphasizes issues that the writer, as distinct from a therapist or researcher, considers important. Autobiographies describe disorders in family and environmental context, provide interesting narratives with strong story lines, and in the end, typically reveal a successful outcome.

There have been at least 100 published bibliographies and book-length anthologies of first-person accounts of mental disorder (Sommer, Clifford, & Norcross, 1998). Some authors are celebrities, already the subject of public interest; others are writers, poets, and artists capable of portraying their inner worlds in words, songs, and drawings. Many accounts are written by ordinary people whose first contact with publishing is writing about their disorder. Some earlier accounts have become classics in mental health education; other books by Kay Jamison (An Unquiet Mind), William Styron (Darkness Visible), and Mark Vonnegut (The Eden Express) are likely to become future classics.

About a quarter of practitioners recommend particular autobiographies to their patients – a significant percentage but below the 80% plus recommending self-help books (Clifford, Norcross, & Sommer, 1999). Moreover, practitioners’ reports on the effects of using autobiographies as part of psychotherapy are quite positive: 9% found them very helpful, 60% found them somewhat helpful, 29% no effect, 2% somewhat harmful, and non very harmful.

Colleagues and I have conducted eight national studies to determine the most useful self-help resources. In each study, we mailed questionnaires to clinical and counseling psychologists and asked them to rate self-help books, autobiographies, and movies. More than 3,500 psychologists contributed their expertise and judgment on more than a thousand of these resources. The Authoritative Guide to Self-Help Resources in Mental Health (Norcross et al., 2003) compiles these ratings for 36 behavioral disorders and life transitions – from Abuse to Women’s Issues.

Table 1 (below) presents the 25 top-rated autobiographies (listed in order from highest) from our national studies. To be eligible for the list, an autobiography had to be rated by a minimum of 25 psychologists.

These expert ratings of autobiographies can guide mental health professionals’ recommendations to their clients as well as consumers’ selection of meritorious resources. Although professional consensus is no guarantee, it is superior to individual judgments, random selection, or best-seller lists. We would, of course, prefer to rely on lists of autobiographies that have been subjected to controlled research and found to be demonstrably effective and safe. Until that time, we can rely on the collective knowledge of thousands of peers to navigate the bewildering self-help maze.

Adapted with permission from Norcross et al. (2003), Authoritative guide to self-help resources in mental health (2nd ed.). New York: Guilford.

References

Clifford, J. S., Norcross, J. C., & Sommer, R. (1999). Autobiographies of mental health clients: Psychologists’ uses and recommendations. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 30, 56–59.

Norcross, J. C., Santrock, J. W., Campbell, L. F., Smith, T. P., Sommer, R., & Zuckerman, E. L. (2003). Authoritative guide to self-help resources in mental health (2nd ed.). New York: Guilford.

Sommer, R., Clifford, J. S., & Norcross, J. C. (1998). A bibliography of mental patients’ autobiographies: An update and classification system. American Journal of Psychiatry, 155, 1261–1264.

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