Reddit reviews Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (New York Review Books Classics)

You have quite the appropriate username. I must warn you that if you're looking for "scary", you might be disappointed. However, because you asked, these are the titles that I can wholeheartedly recommend:

Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville

Naked Lunch by William S Burroughs

Sanatorium under the sign of the Hourglass by Bruno Schulz

Oyasumi Punpun by Inio Asano (translation: "Goodnight Punpun." This one is actually a manga series. If you've never read manga before, check this one out. You won't be disappointed.)

Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown

Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky (I have a bit of a personal attachment to this one for reasons that may seem obvious)

Memoirs of my Nervous Illness by Daniel Paul Schreber (This one was recommended by one of my readers, and I'm very glad I added it to the rotation)

Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone

We are Legion by Dennis E. Taylor (a bit of science fiction fantasy that really makes you question the concept of identity)

The Masks of Time by Robert Silverberg

Tales of 1,001 Nights, author(s) unknown

A few other authors and stories I would recommend:
Philip K. Dick;
The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler;
Patricia Highsmith;
James Lee Burke;
Jorge Luis Borges;
William Gibson;
Dashiell Hammett;
Haruki Murakami;
Charles Baudelaire;
Ambros Bierce;
Nikolai Gogol;
Alberty Camus;
Nathaniel Hawthorne;
M R James;
H G Wells;
J G Ballard;
Thomas Ligotti;

That's about all I can think of right now, but I think it's a pretty good place to start.

Yes I definitely need to read up. But I'm a civil engineer not a psychology student so I don't have access to those college subscriptions :). I just have an interest in psychology and a friend of mine has recently been committed for delusions+schizophrenia.

But back on topic, were these brain abnormalities caused by the schizophrenia period, or did these people already have them all the time? I've followed your link and came to this book: http://www.amazon.com/Memoirs-Nervous-Illness-Review-Classics/dp/094032220X/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_y

Excerpt:

> Schreber, second son (the first committed suicide) of an abusive father, was at the peak of a brilliant career in Leipzig when he was appointed Presiding Judge of the Saxon High Court of Appeals. Alas, the stress of his new job proved too much for him, and before long he was hearing voices and feeling suicidal. Within weeks he was committed, having rapidly descended into madness, and was placed under the care of Dr. Paul Emil Flechsig.

So a normally functioning man turned schizophrenic due to stress. Was his brain already deformed or did it get deformed after he got schizophrenic? In the latter case, it could still be that it is an emotional problem that happens and ends up warping their minds.

Memoirs of my Nervous Illness is great. It has perhaps the most complex and bizarrely lucid descriptions of a schizophrenic's world ever written.
"In 1884, the distinguished German jurist Daniel Paul Schreber suffered the first of a series of mental collapses that would afflict him for the rest of his life. In his madness, the world was revealed to him as an enormous architecture of nerves, dominated by a predatory God. It became clear to Schreber that his personal crisis was implicated in what he called a "crisis in God's realm," one that had transformed the rest of humanity into a race of fantasms. There was only one remedy; as his doctor noted: Schreber "considered himself chosen to redeem the world, and to restore to it the lost state of Blessedness. This, however, he could only do by first being transformed from a man into a woman....""

http://www.amazon.com/Memoirs-Nervous-Illness-Review-Classics/dp/094032220X