Elvis and the Northern Lights: A Psychology Professor’s Struggles with Mental Illness and Addiction

by Ted Beauchaine

When Dr. Ted Beauchaine’s baby daughter arrives three months early on Father’s Day, 2023, he knows the life he spent decades building is over. With his marriage crumbling and his wife about to leave him, Beauchaine finally grasps, after years of denial, that he must abandon his career as a prominent Notre Dame professor or lose everything to his secret addiction. Lying in warm sunshine with baby Elli asleep on his chest, he resolves to start over, fearing he may never see her again.

Desperate for this time to be different, Beauchaine rejects the posh treatment centers that failed him before and checks into a working-class program better suited to his chaotic upbringing. What begins as a soul-crushing blow to his identity transforms into a pilgrimage through his family’s legacy of alcoholism, violence, and profound mental illness—the very topics he spent years teaching to college students but ran away from in his personal life.

Mixing sometimes deeply disturbing personal narratives with scientific perspectives on addiction, Beauchaine explains how genes, our brains, and trauma combine to cause addiction, how culture makes addiction a bigger problem in the U.S. than in most other countries, and how stigma in our healthcare system works against sustained recovery.

Beauchaine’s story, told with ruthless honesty and deep professional wisdom, probes the depths of human frailty and self-doubt, and the profound capacity of love and forgiveness to mend what seems hopelessly broken.

381 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 23, 2026

Reviews

[Jen Cheavens]

It feels inappropriate to rate this book so I’m not going to do so. However, I think it is important to say something to any clinical psychology trainees or folks who might someday want to be in a training program. First, in my 20+ years in academic clinical psychology, I have NEVER been in a meeting where “preemptively” limiting someone’s clinical training based on a diagnosis was discussed. Never. Pressing pause on someone’s working with clients is a big decision and is only based after treatment interfering behaviors are observed. Second, I have had MANY colleagues and students discuss mental health diagnoses with me, including colleagues who are in recovery. I have also seen people talk about personal mental health issues in classes and other public forums. Every year I have students and colleagues approach me for recommendations for referrals. This is all to say, if you are in a clinical psychology training program or want to be in a clinical psychology training program and you are struggling with a mental health disorder, you can talk to someone and you can be successful in the program. Talk to someone you trust early about how to balance taking care of your own mental health in the context of taking care of others.

[Mia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I haven't started reading yet, but I'm already unsettled and that's exactly the right reaction.
The description alone stopped me. A psychology professor who spent 25 years studying addiction, teaching it to college students, conducting NIH-funded research on it... and living a secret double life inside it. That irony isn't played for drama in the blurb, it's stated plainly, which somehow makes it hit harder. "The very topics he spent years teaching to college students but ran away from in his personal life." That line sat with me.
The cover matches the tension of that premise, something cold and luminous about it, like those northern lights themselves: beautiful on the surface, disorienting if you look too long. And the image of a man lying in warm sunshine with a premature baby asleep on his chest, knowing his career is over, is the kind of opening scene you'd expect from literary fiction, not a memoir. Dr. Beauchaine clearly knows how to set a stage. I'm going in.