Reading Map: More Than It Hurts You

The Cloud of Unknowing
Cook, Thomas F/COO
Jason Regan, a severely schizophrenic child, is found drowned in a pond behind his family's home. Jason's mother, Diana, believes that her ex-husband, Mark, has murdered their son. The story is narrated by Diana's brother, Dave Sears, who comes to believe Diana has gone insane. Dave has good reason to think so; their father was a raving paranoid schizophrenic. Cook employs a curious narrative structure, dividing the story into two alternating sections: one in which Dave is being interviewed by a police detective about an unnamed crime, written in second-person, and another that Dave narrates in first-person. In the beginning it's unclear if a crime occurred at all; the police rule that Jason walked into the pond on his own. Then it appears that there was not only one murder but possibly two, three or even four.

Life You Longed For, The
Fischer, Maribeth F/FIS
Grace Connolly's three-year-old son, Jack, has been diagnosed with mitochondrial disease. Because the fatal disease produces an array of misleading symptoms, Jack can, at times, appear perfectly healthy. Grace, who has a medical background, struggles to keep herself from falling into total despair. When she is charged with Munchausen syndrome by proxy, Jack is removed from his home just as he is in the final stages of his illness. As the investigation uncovers Grace's flaws--she is carrying on an affair with an old high-school love; she has been a fierce and sometimes overly aggressive advocate for her child--she starts to feel like her every move is being scrutinized.

Once In a Blue Moon
Goudge, Eileen F/GOU
As children, sisters Lindsay and Kerri Ann are shunted into the foster care system after their mother is arrested for selling drugs. Lindsay is fortunate enough to be adopted by a loving family, while younger Kerri Ann bounces from family to family, becoming a teenage runaway, getting into drugs and eventually losing custody of her own daughter. Thirty years after they last saw each other, Kerri Ann shows up on Lindsay's doorstep in a last ditch effort to save herself. Lindsay, of course, has troubles of her own, and her nearly unrecognizable sister turning up is the last thing she needs.

Nearer Than the Sky
Greenwood, Tammy F/GRE
Indie, brother Benny, and especially baby sister Lily had many close calls throughout their childhood. Now Lily is a mother, and her daughter Violet is plagued with many illnesses and has come close to death more than once in her first year of life. Is Lily re-enacting her own childhood? Indie must try to make sense of both the past and the present, and quickly.

Playing Sick? Untangling the Web of Munchausen by Proxy, Malingering & Factitious Disorder
Feldman, Marc 616.858/FEL
When a person fakes illness or injury to satisfy emotional needs, doctors and family members are lured into a costly, frustrating, and potentially deadly web of deceit.

Psychiatrist Marc Feldman describes patients' strange motivations, from malingerers who invent chronic back pain to avoid work to mothers who demand major abdominal surgery for their healthy children because they derive perverse pleasure from medical attention. Self-induced bleeding, fake fevers, and even a bogus asthma attack so convincing that doctors rush the patient to ICU are the stock in trade of patients with these disorders. Practitioners are deeply disturbed by these patients, angry about the time and resources they consume but nervous about confronting them with the truth.

Based on years of research and clinical practice, Playing Sick? provides the clues that can help practitioners and family members recognize these disorders, avoid invasive procedures, and sort out the motives that drive people to hurt themselves and deceive others. With insight and years of hands-on experience, Feldman shows how to get these emotionally ill patients the psychiatric help they need.