7 Books To Guide You On Your Mental Health Journey
Photo by Arif Riyanto.
Books about mental health can be a great resource and entry point into understanding more about our minds and our wellbeing. Whether you’re working through your own mental health journey, seeking advice on getting through tough times, looking for similar stories to let you know that you’re not alone, or hoping to support a loved one by understanding more about what they’re going through – these books are a great starting point.
Here are some of our top picks this Mental Health Awareness Week:
1. To Let You Know You’re Not Alone:
It's Not OK to Feel Blue (and Other Lies): Inspirational People Open Up About Their Mental Health, ed. by Scarlett Curtis
This book is comforting, powerful, funny, and moving: featuring personal writing from over 70 people, this book breaks the stigma surrounding mental health and lets us know that it’s okay. In normalising mental health struggles and opening up the conversation, these stories from inspirational people like Sam Smith, Emilia Clarke, and Candice Carty-Williams bring psychology back down to a human level. When one in four of us will experience a mental health issue, this book is here to remind us all that we’re not alone.
2. To Give You Coping Mechanisms Through Tough Times:
Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before?, by Dr Julie Smith
Using her years of experience as a clinical psychologist, Dr Julie Smith’s book provides the skills you need to navigate common challenges in life to reclaim control of your emotional and mental health. If you want to learn how to manage your anxiety, cope with depression, handle criticism better, grow your self-confidence, find motivation, or learn to forgive yourself, Dr Smith’s practical advice can help! For a deeper understanding of your own psychology and tools to help you nurture your mental health, this book could be exactly what you’re looking for.
3. To Ease Your Social Anxiety:
How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety, by Dr Ellen Hendriksen
If you’re shy or introverted, you might find yourself struggling with social anxiety. This book argues that social anxiety results from the inner critic speaking too loudly. Dr Hendriksen believes that we already have everything we need to succeed in social situations – we just need to learn how to access it. Combining science, self-help tips, and personal stories of real people who have stood up to their social anxiety, Dr Hendriksen explains the roots of social anxiety and why it endures, in order to help you overcome it.
If you want to be yourself and feel good about it, this book is for you!
4. For LGBTQ+ Readers And Their Allies:
The Queer Mental Health Workbook: A Creative Self-Help Guide Using CBT, CFT and DBT, by Dr Brendan J Dunlop
Catered specifically towards the alienation that can come from feeling different to the people around you, The Queer Mental Health Workbook is here to improve the wellbeing of queer readers. This book is empowering and reassuring, and clearly much-needed – a 2018 study by Stonewall found that 52% of LGBT said they’d experienced depression in the last year, and one in eight LGBT people aged 18-24 said they attempted to take their own life in the last year. One in seven LGBT people had avoided treatment for fear of discrimination.
Exploring difficult topics such as anxiety, low self-esteem, eating disorders, self-harm, suicidal ideation, shame, trauma, substance abuse, sleep, and low mood, Dr Brendan J Dunlop uses a range of therapeutic approaches in this comprehensive self-help workbook all while maintaining a focus on your needs as a queer individual.
5. To Relieve Pain And Stress With Mindfulness:
Mindfulness for Health: A Practical Guide to Relieving Pain, Reducing Stress and Restoring Wellbeing, by Vidyamala Burch and Dr Danny Penman
Based on a unique meditation programme developed by Vidyamala Burch to help her cope with the severe pain of spinal injury, Mindfulness for Health guides you through an eight-week programme, taking just 10-20 minutes out of each day. If you’ve found meditation difficult or overwhelming in the past, these easy, bite-sized steps are a great way to ease into a mindful meditation practice. Revealing a series of simple practices to reduce stress and relieve chronic pain, this book uses mindfulness meditation as a tool to enhance the body’s natural healing systems – ideal if you want to tackle the anxiety, depression, irritability, exhaustion and insomnia that can result from chronic pain and illness.
6. To Challenge Systemic Problems in Mental Health Care:
We’ve Been Too Patient: Voices from Radical Mental Health, ed. by L.D. Green and Kelechi Ubozoh
This book presents 25 stories and essays from the front lines of the radical mental health movement, and aims to shift the conversation from mental illness to mental health. Although these stories are not always easy to stomach, We’ve Been Too Patient is an important read which sheds light on experiences of overmedication, police brutality, electroconvulsive therapy, and involuntary hospitalisation – which all lead to further trauma for those labelled ‘mentally ill’. By amplifying the voices of those with personal experiences of psychiatric miscare, such as people of colour and LGBTQ+ communities, this book is dedicated to finding working alternatives to the biomedical model of mental health care.
7. To Fight Racial Inequality in Mental Health Services:
The Colour of Madness: Exploring BAME mental health in the UK, ed. by Dr. Samara Linton & Rianna Walcott
Described by editor Samara Linton as "a platform for people from BAME communities to shape conversations about mental health in the UK," this anthology is an urgent response to the inequality faced by BAME people with mental health issues, for whom the struggle of living with mental illness and its associated stigma is compounded by racial discrimination. When young Black men are far more likely than other groups to be sectioned and physically restrained, and BAME people are less likely to be offered talking therapies and more likely to be prescribed medication alone, urgent education and change is required. Comprising essays, fiction, poetry and more, this essential read is a call to action for healthcare professionals in the UK and beyond.
