Mental Health

As a criminal justice reporter for the Houston Chronicle, Keri Blakinger has a special interest in covering the conditions of prisoners — in part because she spent nearly two years locked up in county and state correctional facilities herself.

Jennifer Fox's new film The Tale is based on her experience of being sexually abused by her running coach when she was 13 years old. But it took her decades to realize what she believed was a relationship of love was really child sexual abuse.

How America's jails and prisons have become America's defacto mental health providers. Journalist Alisa Roth is the author of the new book 'Insane: America's Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness.'

Lauren Slater is a journalist, practicing psychologist and a patient of psychotropic drugs - drugs that alter brain chemistry to treat problems like mood disorders and anxiety. She'll talk about her personal and professional experience with these drugs.

As someone who lives with obsessive-compulsive disorder, novelist John Green sometimes feels like his mind is spiraling uncontrollably.

In her new memoir, "Sometimes Amazing Things Happen," psychiatrist Elizabeth Ford writes about the horror and the hope she found in treating Rikers inmates.

Ron Powers has written a personal and historical book about the treatment of the mentally ill in the U.S. He watched his two sons be transformed by schizophrenia. His youngest son committed suicide after struggling with the disease; a few years later his oldest son was diagnosed with the same disease.

Kay Redfield Jamison's new book describes how Lowell's manic-depressive illness influenced his life and work. "His manias tended to lead him into writing a fresh kind of poetry," she says.

There are two things viewers should know right from the start about Legion, which premieres Wednesday night on FX. One is that it doesn't look, or feel, like a drama based on a comic book — it's more like a next-generation version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, as filtered through H.P. Lovecraft or Edgar Allan Poe.

Married couple Rennie and Brett Sparks have been making songs together as The Handsome Family for 21 years. In 2014, they gained much wider fame when their haunting song, "Far From Any Road," became the theme for the first season of HBO's True Detective.

He's helped many people through painful passages in their lives. And he's faced his own: Since a near-fatal auto accident in 1979, he's been paralyzed from the chest down. Gottlieb has had nearly three decades to come to terms with the changed circumstances of his body — but now, he fears, that body may be growing tired.

While embedded with troops in Iraq, David Morris almost died when a Humvee he was riding in ran over a roadside bomb. His book explores the history and science of post-traumatic stress disorder.

David Adam has had obsessive-compulsive disorder for 20 years. In The Man Who Couldn't Stop, he chronicles his experiences -- and how medical understanding and treatment of OCD have changed over time.

John Darnielle's novel, Wolf in White Van, is about a man who survives trauma. The songwriter tells Fresh Air and finding shelter in music and the Incredible Hulk.

P.J. Hogan's new movie is madder than madcap, a zany, nonconformist boundary-pusher whose offbeat manner makes for a rich and grounded film. Toni Collete plays the part of a modern-day Maria von Trapp as if she has nothing to lose -- and Anthony LaPaglia shows his true Aussie accent.

In the author's latest novel, The Devil in Silver, a man is mistakenly committed to a mental hospital where a buffalo-headed monster stalks patients at night. LaValle tells Fresh Air why he picked monsters, about his family history of mental illness and how he had his own brush with psychological problems.

The year is 1622, and a tormented English Puritan strikes out for the Plymouth Plantation in Hugh Nissenson's moody, intelligent novel. Critic Maureen Corrigan say The Pilgrim is a work of straightforward historical fiction -- of the sort ta you don't see so much anymore.

In HBO's In Treatment, Gabriel Byrne stars as a psychotherapist who is working through some serious issues of his own. Executive producers and writers Anya Epstein and Dan Futterman discuss the show's third season.

Actor and comedian Zach Galifianakis is best known for his shaggy red beard and his hilarious role in the bachelor-party comedy The Hangover. He tells Terry Gross how he prepared himself for his latest part -- a dramatic role as a mental patient in the film It's Kind of a Funny Story.