After suffering three psychotic breakdowns in rapid succession in the early 1970s, Mark Vonnegut thought he had mental illness whipped. He was still in his early 20s and had recovered admirably from his attacks, achieving emotional stability that he thought would endure for the rest of his life. He published his first book, “The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity,” in 1975 to critical acclaim. In it, he shared his newfound wisdom about the keys to beating mental illness.  

It came as no small surprise when, 14 years after this third mental break, Vonnegut suffered a fourth crack-up. By then, he had graduated from Harvard Medical School, was a respected pediatrician, and was married with two children. No one saw it coming.

It was an ugly one, too. He plucked rocks from an aquarium and threw them at his wife. He then attempted to dive through a closed third-story window, shattering the glass but bouncing back into the room unharmed. He was escorted from his own house in a straightjacket.

Now, Vonnegut has a new memoir. Titled “Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So,” it will be published in paperback by Bantam Dell on Tuesday, Sept. 27. The Massachusetts resident will be at Water Street Bookstore in Exeter that night to read from his new work.

A couple of factors drove Vonnegut to publish a second memoir about mental illness more than 35 years after the first. For starters, he’s learned a lot since then.

“I think all authors sort of regret what they write,” he said. “There were lots of things which I said in ‘The Eden Express’ which I came to feel were just plain wrong.”

Another factor was the death of his father, Kurt Vonnegut, in 2007. As his only son and eldest child, Mark Vonnegut witnessed his father’s unlikely transition from a poor, reclusive used car salesman to a famous, high-society novelist. After his father’s death at age 84, Mark Vonnegut felt a sort of liberation that allowed him to write freely and openly about his childhood, he said.

While capable of great warmth and compassion, the elder Vonnegut was a socially aloof and awkward man with an odd approach to parenting. Mark had few friends growing up and didn’t play sports. His father seemed to take pride in his son’s social alienation.

“He was kind of like a big, overgrown sibling in many ways,” Mark said.

A transformative period in Mark’s life came at age 11, when his parents adopted his four cousins, whose own parents had died tragically within two days of each other. His cousins taught him how to play sports, talk to girls and find social acceptance. And, despite the enormous financial and parental burden, the next 10 years proved an exceptionally prolific time for Kurt Vonnegut. He published six novels during that span, including “Cat’s Cradle” and “Slaughterhouse Five.”

“I think it’s often that way with artists,” Mark Vonnegut said of his father’s success. “When you set yourself up in the perfect room with the perfect typewriter and you don’t have any money troubles anymore, it all comes to a grinding halt. I don’t know for sure, but I think money problems and the issues of raising his sisters’ kids certainly took him out of himself, and it’s a remarkable body of work he put together during those 10 years.”

Mark Vonnegut went to college in the late ’60s and fully embraced the hippie ideals. After graduating, he and some friends started a commune in British Columbia, where they grew their own food and built their own shelters. Vonnegut was sure of himself and his mission.

But it was during this time that Vonnegut first started hearing voices. He’s not sure what, exactly, triggered his first mental breakdown, but there were many candidates. His parents had just split up and his girlfriend had run off with another guy.

“I think at a certain point I just sort of said to myself, ‘Well, to hell with it. Maybe these voices have something to offer,’” he said.

During this break and the two that followed, Vonnegut engaged in imagined conversations with famous writers, musicians and historical figures. His mind invented crises, like a sudden lack of oxygen in the room, which he attempted to fix by hurling a rock through a window.

Doctors initially diagnosed Vonnegut with schizophrenia but later changed their minds and called him manic depressive, which is now referred to as bipolar. With the aid of medication, he convalesced remarkably and reemerged feeling strong and healthy.

“I had a feeling of having survived something, and I had a feeling of certainly being as good as anybody else on the planet Earth, which is a hard thing for people in their early 20s to get,” he said. “And, on some level, I can still sort of remember a little bit of my conversations with Dostoyevsky and Mark Twain, and talking about music with John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk, and that was all pretty good.”

Getting into Harvard Medical School and becoming a pediatrician seemed to confirm that Vonnegut’s mental health woes were behind him. But, almost without noticing, he gradually developed a dependency on alcohol and Xanax. When he recognized his problem and tried to quit, the voices came back with a vengeance. And he was no longer interested in listening.

“(The voices) scare the hell out of me,” he said. “I feel like my attraction for madness has been thoroughly immunized. I’ll do almost anything to avoid it.”

More than 25 years later, Vonnegut still worries that another breakdown could seize him at any moment. The doctor now lives in Massachusetts with his second wife and their young son. Now 64, he paints regularly and is at work on a novel. He’s found that making art is critical to mental health. The key, he said, is “actually doing an art or creativity rather than getting drawn into the illusion that the illness is making you creative, and to actually write and paint and do the discipline of an art.”

“Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So” is filled with witty insights about mental illness and wellness, as well as numerous cynical jabs at the medical industry, which has become mired in the shameless profiteering of insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

Vonnegut’s scathing but humorous writing style clearly calls his father to mind. And yet he believes his father borrowed from him as much as the inverse. Mental illness, after all, was hardly an uncommon topic in Kurt Vonnegut’s work.

What would Kurt have thought about his son’s latest book?

“Well, it would have been sort of like ‘The Eden Express,’ where he was pissed off at first and really fumed and smoked and sputtered, and then came to like it,” Mark said. “I think he would have gone through exactly the same sort of process.”

Mark Vonnegut will read from his new book at 7 p.m. on Sept. 27 at Water Street Bookstore, 125 Water St., Exeter, 603-778-9731.