Whether you are looking to better understand your own mental health, support a loved one, or simply broaden your knowledge during Mental Health Awareness Week, here are six books that are invaluable resources, ranging from personal memoirs to guides to living a more fulfilling life through slowing down and exploring more creative pursuits.
Unlocking the doors to the psych ward, NHS psychiatrist Dr Benji Waterhouse provides a fly-on-the-padded-wall account of medicine’s most mysterious and controversial speciality.
Why would anyone in their right mind choose to be a psychiatrist? Are the solutions to people’s messy lives really within medical school textbooks? And how can vulnerable patients receive the care they need when psychiatry lacks staff, hospital beds and any actual cures?
This is an eye-opening medical memoir – from both sides of the doctor’s desk.
Suleika Jaouad’s journal has been a lifelong companion: marking life’s great occasions and helping her ride its roughest waves, through illness, heartbreak, and the deepest oceans of uncertainty.
The Book of Alchemy explores this art and offers companionship and support to those seeking to navigate the in-between. It gives readers invaluable tools to engage with discomfort and peel back the layers shrouding their truest selves.
Our lives can feel defined by the struggle with overwhelm, endless decisions and striving to be productive. Wouldn’t it be good to stop doing all that? What if we could find freedom – and get more of the important things done – by embracing our limitations, and by letting things happen instead of forcing them?
This book is a profound and liberating crash course in living more fully. It overturns much familiar advice and opens a gateway to a saner, freer and more enchantment-filled life.
Do you feel you’re simply going through the motions? Succeeding at work, pulling your weight at home, living an active social life… yet deep down, you feel drained? If so, you may be experiencing High-Functioning Depression.
In the first book to uncover this common yet misunderstood condition, Columbia University clinical psychologist Dr Judith Joseph combines her experiences with brand-new research and client cases to demystify HFD. She unveils her unique methodology known as the five V's: Validation, Venting, Values, Vitals and Vision . These empowering steps help us put an end to self-sacrifice and self-sabotage, heal our relationships, and go from barely surviving to truly thriving.
Have you ever been so absorbed in writing, drawing, cooking, dancing, yoga, music or crafting that you lost track of time? In neuroscience, this is known as ‘flow’, a focused state where the mind and body are at their most serene. Former dancer and neuroscientist Julia Christensen reveals why you experience overthinking and shares a 7-step method for creating a reliable pathway to flow to effortlessly unlock the creative genius within you. Boost your mood, calm your mind, and enjoy the magic of flow every day.
Distress has been commodified over many decades by pharmaceutical companies, the media and the psychiatric establishment. So how can we know when distress is normal and when it is something that needs to be treated?
In Searching for Normal , Dr Sami Timimi explores the political and cultural context of these phenomena and presents, instead, a deeply humane approach that looks at the person as a whole – their family context, their culture, their personal resilience – and advocates for a reframing of how we think about and treat distress.
