Our understanding of mental illness has come far since Dr. Baird suffered from bipolar disease (then known as schizophrenia or manic depression), but asking for help can still be a daunting and confusing process. Today, there are many valuable mental health resources that can make it easier to reach out, a few of which are listed below.

 

 

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Further Reading

In writing this book, Mimi found inspiration in others’ stories—whether the writers experienced mental illness themselves, loved someone who did, or sought to humanize other sufferers. The works cited below do not comprise a comprehensive list of books that in some way informed He Wanted the Moon, but serve as a starting point for curious readers.

Nonfiction

• Touched by Fire and An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison
• Searching for Mercy Street by Linda Gray Sexton
• We Heard the Angels of Madness by Diane and Lisa Berger
• A Mind that Found Itself by Clifford Whittingham Beers
• The Professor and the Madman by Simon Winchester
• A Mood Apart by Peter C. Whybrow
• The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by Peter Dally
• Darkness Visible by William Styron
• Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
• Memoirs of My Nervous Illness by Daniel Paul Schreber
• The Noonday Demon and Far from the Tree by Andrew Solomon
• Madness by Marya Hornbacher
• My Age of Anxiety by Scott Stossel
• The Center Cannot Hold by Elyn R. Saks
• The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls
• The Memory Palace by Mira Bartok
• My Lobotomy by Howard Duffy and Charles Fleming
• Manic by Terri Cheney

 

Fiction

• The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• The Snake Pit by Mary Jane Ward

 

Poetry

• Selected Poems, Robert Lowell
• Selected Poems, Anne Sexton