This Mental Health Awareness Month, commit to being kinder to yourself and others. Explore these selected titles to help reduce the stigma surrounding mental health and create a more compassionate and supportive world for everyone.
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In this breakthrough book, clinical psychologist Lindsay Gibson exposes the destructive nature of parents who are emotionally immature or unavailable. You will see how these parents create a sense of neglect, and discover ways to heal from the pain and confusion caused by your childhood. By freeing yourself from your parents’ emotional immaturity, you can recover your true nature, control how you react to them, and avoid disappointment. Finally, you’ll learn how to create positive, new relationships so you can build a better life.
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Trauma is a fact of life. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma, has spent over three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust. He explores innovative treatments—from neurofeedback and meditation to sports, drama, and yoga—that offer new paths to recovery by activating the brain’s natural neuroplasticity.
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Highly sensitive people (HSPs) and those who identify as empaths are natural targets for narcissists, emotional vampires, and other controlling people due to their giving nature. The Highly Sensitive Person's Guide to Dealing with Toxic People is a practical road map to help HSPs identify and deal effectively with toxic people—at work, in the family, in friendships, or in romantic relationships.
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The quest for perfection is exhausting and unrelenting. We spend too much precious time and energy managing perception and creating carefully edited versions of ourselves to show to the world. As hard as we try, we can't seem to turn off the tapes that fill our heads with messages like, "Never good enough!" and "What will people think?"
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Depression. Anxiety. Chronic Pain. Phobias. Obsessive thoughts. The evidence is compelling: the roots of these difficulties may not reside in our immediate life experience or in chemical imbalances in our brains—but in the lives of our parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. The latest scientific research, now making headlines, supports what many have long intuited—that traumatic experience can be passed down through generations. It Didn't Start with You builds on the work of leading experts in post-traumatic stress, including Mount Sinai School of Medicine neuroscientist Rachel Yehuda and psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score.
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Maureen "Marzi" Wilson—the popular Instagram cartoonist—is back with a brand-new collection of hilarious, relatable, and heartwarming doodles about anxiety that show you that you are not alone. In Kind of Coping, join Marzi as she (kind of) copes with her own anxiety from day to day, finding the humor in her condition with this collection of funny, encouraging, and supportive comics that show you the best you can do sometimes is just kind of cope—and that's totally okay!
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One day, Lori Gottlieb is a therapist who helps patients in her Los Angeles practice. The next, a crisis causes her world to come crashing down. Enter Wendell, the quirky but seasoned therapist in whose office she suddenly lands. With his balding head, cardigan, and khakis, he seems to have come straight from Therapist Central Castin—yet, he'll turn out to be anything but. Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is revolutionary in its candor, offering a deeply personal yet universal tour of our hearts and minds and providing the rarest of gifts: a boldly revealing portrait of what it means to be human, and a disarmingly funny and illuminating account of our own mysterious lives and our power to transform them.
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A compassionate and eye-opening examination of evolving attitudes toward mental illness throughout history and the fight to end the stigma. For centuries, scientists and society cast moral judgments on anyone deemed mentally ill, confining many to asylums. In Nobody's Normal, anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker chronicles the progress and setbacks in the struggle against mental-illness stigma—from the 18th century, through America's major wars, and into today's high-tech economy. Grinker infuses the book with the personal history of his family's four generations of involvement in psychiatry, including his grandfather's analysis with Sigmund Freud, his own daughter's experience with autism, and culminating in his research on neurodiversity.
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Healthy boundaries. We all know we should have them in order to achieve work-life balance, cope with toxic people, and enjoy rewarding relationships with partners, friends, and family. But what do "healthy boundaries" really mean—and how can we successfully express our needs, say "No," and be assertive without offending others?
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Imagine, if you will, a disease—one that has only subtle outward symptoms but can hijack your entire body without notice, one that transfers easily between parent and child, one that can last a lifetime if untreated. According to Dr. Paul Conti, this is exactly how society should conceptualize trauma: as an out-of-control epidemic with a potentially fatal prognosis. In Trauma: The Invisible Epidemic, Dr. Conti examines the most recent research, clinical best practices, and dozens of real-life stories to present a deeper and more urgent view of trauma. Not only does Dr. Conti explain how trauma affects the body and mind, he also demonstrates that trauma is transmissible among close family and friends, as well as across generations and within vast demographic groups.
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We think of anxiety as everything from mild unease to full-blown panic, but it's also what drives the addictive behaviors and bad habits we use to cope. In Unwinding Anxiety, Dr. Judson Brewer teaches us map our brains to discover our triggers, defuse them with the simple but powerful practice of curiosity, and to train our brains using mindfulness and other practices that his lab has proven can work. Distilling more than 20 years of research and hands-on work with thousands of patients, Dr. Brewer has created a clear, solution-oriented program that anyone can use to feel better—no matter how anxious they feel.