Monster in the Cave: How to Face Your Fear and Anxiety and Live Your Life, David Mellinger and Steven Jay Lynn

Monster in the Cave: How to Face Your Fear and Anxiety and Live Your Life

David Mellinger and Steven Jay Lynn

I found this book to possibly help my husband, who has had some severe issues with anxiety and dissociative episodes. It was easy to understand and talks about many different kinds of anxiety and also includes such issues as schizophrenia, OCD, etc. There are chapters on different types of medication used for treatment, what they do, pros and cons to taking them as well. There are worksheets to use for different exercises in learning how to control anxiety, and many different things you can do to help cope with it and overcome it. It took me most of the summer to get through it...not exactly pleasure reading, but also we dealt with my mother and mother in law having medical issues and taking care of them... so not a lot of reading went on over the summer. Glad to be done with this, it was enlightening.
 

One Glorious Ambition, by Jane Kirkpatrick

One Glorious Ambition, by Jane Kirkpatrick

This is the true story of Dorothea Dix, a single woman in the 1800s who ended up spending the majority of her life on a crusade to help the unfortunate, mainly the mentally ill, lobbying for funding and construction of humane insane asylums across the country. 

It starts out in her childhood, in extreme poverty with a mother who is implied to be mentally ill, and an alcoholic and irresponsible father. She begged her grandmother for help, and her grandmother sent her to relatives. While with them, she decided to become a teacher of the young and unfortunate, which she did for many years, but after almost dying of an illness, she found her true calling, that of lobbying for the mentally ill. 

That a woman could be heard and make such an impact in that time period, is an amazing feat in itself. She was able to make a difference in countless lives.

Jane Kirkpatrick always does such an excellent job researching and writing in the voice of the character. This is not the first book I have read of hers and certainly won't be the last. 

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