In Safe: A Memoir, Elspeth Roake shares her journey with depression and trauma-related disordered attachment, from the lowest lows to finally finding healing. Elspeth competed in horse shows, and the book begins in Florida for the winter show season, with her going into the hospital for suicidal ideation. She ended up being Baker Acted (committed […]
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Stop Avoiding Stuff, by Matthew S. Boone, Jennifer Gregg, and Lisa W. Coyne, tackles avoidance using techniques from acceptance and commitment therapy. It teaches microskills that you can use as alternatives to avoidance, and suggests teeny tiny practices along the way. The book starts off with a look at what avoidance is and why we
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Mindful as F*ck by Emily Horn is aimed at people who’ve slept through yoga and can’t stand green juice. It’s lighthearted, and provides 100 mindfulness exercises for readers to try. The exercises draw on meditation, yoga, Buddhism, Ayurveda, reiki, chakra healing, and the law of attraction. The book is part mindfulness with a big dollop
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Mindful Somatic Awareness for Anxiety Relief by Michele L. Blume presents a body-based approach to dealing with anxiety. It’s based on Somatic Experiencing, which is a type of trauma therapy. While the book talks about fear, worry, and anxiety, there’s no explicit mention of anxiety disorders. The book describes anxiety this way: “Anxiety is a
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My Beautiful Psychosis by Emma Goude is a gripping, up close and personal look at what it’s actually like to experience psychosis. The author’s honesty and complete openness quickly shatter any stereotypes of psychosis being frightening and dangerous. The book begins with the events leading up to the author’s first episode of psychosis. When she
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My Colour-Coded Life tells Megan Jackson Hall’s story of living with schizoaffective disorder. She writes that she hopes the book will help to destigmatize mental illness. The book is made up of diary-style entries from 2008 to 2018. It offers a fascinating insight into living with active psychosis on a day to day basis, written
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Liar Liar by Laurie Katz tells her story of being raped in her first year of college, and the school’s (mis)handling of the matter. It’s part of the Inspirational series by Trigger Publishing, a mental health publisher. The book opens with the night she was raped. Afterwards, contrary to society’s expectations that someone go to
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In The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays, Esmé Weijun Wang shares how schizoaffective disorder and, in particular, other people’s reactions to it have affected her life. The author was first diagnosed with bipolar disorder while attending Stanford University. It took nine years to get a schizoaffective disorder diagnosis, as doctors seemed reluctant to diagnose a primary psychotic
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Don’t Believe Everything You Feel by Robert L. Leahy uses an emotional schema approach to help you manage anxiety and depression. Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) tools are used as part of this approach. It’s set up as a workbook, with a substantial amount of text interspersed with worksheets. Some of the worksheets are fairly structured,
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The Gratitude Project, edited by Jeremy Adam Smith et al., is a project of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley in California. It includes chapters by a number of different authors on various aspects of gratitude. I liked that the book took a realistic approach to what gratitude can and can not do.
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