Brain books

This is a list of notable books about the brain, both scientific and literary, from the Dana Foundation, which describes itself as "a private philanthropy with principal interests in brain science, immunology, and arts education."

Some of these, like Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness, Joseph LeDoux's The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life, and Joseph Sapolsky's Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, I've read as I've done research to better understand my mental health. Others, like Antonio Damasio's Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain and Peter Kramer's Listening to Prozac: A Psychiatrist Explores Antidepressant Drugs and the Remaking of the Self, I've already been planning to read.

Seems like a very good list, overall -- that it includes books I've enjoyed and found really informative definitely encourages me to check out more than a few of the titles on it.

I don't want to pretend to be any kind of expert on these topics, but, inspired by the Dana Foundation's list, here are some books about panic, anxiety, and depression that I've found inspiring, fascinating, and educational:

1. The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life by Joseph LeDoux. This book is also on the Dana Foundation list, which describes it as follows: "The Emotional Brain reasons its way through questions about the nature of emotions, conservation of emotional systems across species, conscious and unconscious emotional responses, and the relationship between feelings and emotions." Mostly, it's about why and how the brain produces fear, and is full of insight into how the brains of panic sufferers work.

2. Darkness Visible by William Styron is an astoundingly evocative look at depression by the author of Sophie's Choice, Lie Down in Darkness, and The Confessions of Nat Turner (who happens to be one of my favorite writers).

3. The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon is a depression sufferer's thorough study of the disease, looking at everything from depression treatments to the history and politics of depression.

4. Wish I Could Be There: Notes from a Phobic Life is by Allen Shawn, son of the famous New Yorker editor William Shawn and brother to actor Wallace Shawn (ever seen The Princess Bride? or My Dinner with Andre?). Shawn, a successful composer, has suffered from crippling phobias, panic, and agoraphobia since childhood. This book does a great job of walking the reader through how runaway fear works, neurologically and psychologically, and of analyzing how the repression and secretiveness of the author's family most likely contributed to his disorder. Where it's a little lacking is in bringing to life the author's most intimate story; reading it, we never get a visceral sense of what it feels like to experience panic.

5. Anxiety and Its Disorders, Second Edition: The Nature and Treatment of Anxiety and Panic by David Barlow: I haven't read this in its entirety, but for those looking to understand anxiety and panic, this is the bible.

How about you? Have you read any books that have been particularly helpful as you work on understanding and dealing with this stuff?