The Overcoming Avoidance Workbook by psychologist Daniel F. Gros aims to help you stop avoiding and start living. It takes a transdiagnostic approach, meaning it focuses on specific behaviours rather than the diagnoses in which they occur. The cover says that it’s for anxiety, depression, or PTSD, but the focus is on anxiety and depression. […]
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But Deliver Me From Crazy by Katie R. Dale is a memoir of living with bipolar disorder. You may know Katie from her blog, and she also contributed a story about bipolar I to my book Making Sense of Psychiatric Diagnosis. The book begins when Katie was in high school, when her illness first appears.
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21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari was recommended to me by Nick of Fiction & Ideas after I wrote about Timothy Snyder’s book On Tyranny. This will be even less of a review than I usually do; more of a mental chewing over what I read. The opening line was, “In
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Nobody’s Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness is written by Roy Richard Grinker, an anthropology professor at The George Washington University. Autism and cross-cultural psychiatry are listed as areas of expertise on his faculty page. He’s the father of an autistic daughter, who he refers to a number of times throughout the
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Bottled Memories by David Ritter is a short book (40 pages) of poetry capturing both active addiction and the process of recovery. While the poems relate to his own experiences, there are themes many others will relate to, including the lure of “one more,” “praying to the porcelain throne,” and doing the walk of shame.
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In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts by Dr. Gabor Maté offers powerful insights into the vulnerable, human side of addiction. It draws on his encounters with patients while working as a staff physician at the Portland Hotel, an ultra-low-barrier supported housing building in Vancouver’s downtown eastside, Canada’s poorest postal code. Ultra-low barrier housing like this
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Calm the F*ck Down by Sarah Knight is part of her series of No Fucks Given Guides; I’ve previously reviewed her book F*ck No. She was one of the earlier adopters of swearing in book titles. The book begins with a note on the title, saying it’s meant to be motivational rather than being an
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The Illustrated Book of Mindful Meditations for Mindless Moments by Courtney E. Ackerman aims to help you be a little more mindful with the basic tasks you’re doing on a day to day basis. Each mindful moment is laid out in a 2-page spread, with a page of brief text (as in a couple of
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Ghosted: Disappearing Acts is the latest novel by Paula Light of Light Motifs II. It’s part mystery, part suspense, and part James Bond, with a twist of romance. The book opens with main character Lily finding out that her brother Jack has died under unusual circumstances in Aruba. The first chapter is delightfully titled “Dead
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The Mindfulness Workbook for OCD by Jon Hershfield and Tom Corboy has just been released in its second edition. I was curious what a mindful approach to OCD would look like, but, as the subtitle says, this is a mindfulness and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) in combination book; it’s not a pull up a cushion
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