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Books on Mental Health
No matter who you are or what day it is, mental health is important. This round-up of books includes diverse stories and voices that remind us there is no “one-size-fits-all” when it comes to mental health challenges and that no matter what you are facing, you are never alone.
All Books in this Collection
Showing 1–16 of 71 results
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A Mingus Lullaby
$20.00Charles Mingus, the renowned musician, composer and civil rights activist, claimed to be three people, was married to one of his wives by Ginsberg, and collaborated with such luminaries as Langston Hughes and Joni Mitchell. Twelve of the poems in A Mingus Lullaby explore moments in his life, compositions, performances, or are part of a fictional conversation between Mingus and the author. Themes from his life permeate throughout the collection.
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Aftermath
$24.95“Powerful, honest, & moving.” — Open Book
Who doesn’t rush to the window when a fire truck rushes by? Bryan Ratushniak, has spent a thirty-two-year career working on the busiest fire trucks in Canada and has detailed his adventures in this witty memoir.
The book details the emotional damage inflicted by the horrors of the job and how the author came out the other side more or less in one piece. Ratushniak shares the ups and downs of balancing home and professional life while trying to hold onto his sanity.
Aftermath is filled with candid, humorous, tragic, and hopeful stories from behind the “big red doors.”
Who doesn?t rush to the window when a fire truck rushes by? Bryan Ratushniak, has spent a thirty-two-year career working on the busiest fire trucks in Canada and has detailed his adventures in this witty and gripping memoir.
Detailing the emotional damage inflicted by the horrors of the job and how the author came out the other side more or less in one piece, Ratushniak shares the ups and downs of balancing home and professional life while trying to hold onto his sanity.
Aftermath: A Firefighter?s Life?is filled with candid, humorous, tragic, and hopeful stories from behind the ?big red doors.?
All Violet
$18.00The posthumous poetry journal of Rani Rivera, Toronto’s champion of mental health advocacy and harm reduction. In All Violet, a young woman chronicles the experience of living on the margins, in spaces and places where body and mind are flayed by guilt, disappointments and betrayals. Her poems record the shattering trauma of struggling to survive through periods of doubt, fear, rage and pain, creating a narrative of disconnection, indignation, alienation and emptiness, the extremes of suffering and desperation. Employing lyrical free verse, Rani Rivera has skillfully employed the short line to pinpoint moments of acute perception. Unadorned, taut and precise cries of pain, loss and fury draw the reader deeper and deeper inside this in-your-face confrontation with a dark world of foreboding alleviated by flashes of mordant wit and grace under fire.
Among Silent Echoes
$24.95Twenty-five years after her mother’s brutal death made the headlines, Phyllis Dyson felt compelled to unearth the truth about her mother’s illness. By chronicling the events of her childhood, uncovering family secrets and betrayals and gaining access to government documents, Dyson has captured the heart of her family’s tragedy in a debut memoir.
From a young age, Phyllis and her brother learned to rely on each other as they dealt with a missing mother, an absent father and a departed grandmother as well as being sent to live with their maternal uncle and his wife, despite their relatives’ lack of interest in the responsibility of raising children. Although brother and sister were happy roaming the Cariboo backwoods surrounding their uncle’s home, there was always darkness beneath the surface.
When she reached the same age her mother was when she was killed during an altercation with a police officer, Dyson became determined to learn the truth about her mother’s fate and the lack of protection extended to her and her brother as children, truths that only deepened her compassion for those struggling with mental illness and for the families that surround them.
Among Silent Echoes is the tender and intimate story of the consequences faced when those who have been given a mandate to protect us do not, and the resilience of one woman who emerged whole from that traumatic world.
Awesome Wildlife Defenders
$15.95Awesome Wildlife Defenders, a junior novel, is the story of eleven-year-old Rebecca, who tries to cope with her panic attacks. Life becomes complicated when she is teamed up with Weird Cedar, on her endangered species project. Her friendship with Frieda is tested when Frieda has to work with Bossy Brianna, the class bully. When Brianna calls Rebecca and Cedar lovebirds, Rebecca is devastated. And, Rebecca and her mom are told their little rental home is being sold. While working on the project of the endangered northern spotted owl, Rebecca discovers that Cedar is kind and a talented artist who carries an enormous burden. When Cedar’s father is released from jail, Rebecca wonders what’s worse, a father who is in jail or not knowing who and where her father is? Cedar’s grandfather takes them to the Raptors to watch a flying demonstration. Rebecca feels the magic when the great horned owl lands on her arm. Is it possible that this unforgettable moment will help her cope with future panic attacks? While staying with his father, Cedar disappears. Rebecca is determined to find him. The endangered species project brings all students together when they sew and sell felt owlets. Will her class raise enough money to adopt twelve endangered species? Will Rebecca and Mom find a place to live or will she be forced to change schools and lose Frieda and her other friends forever?
Because Venus Crossed an Alpine Violet on the Day that I Was Born
$23.00Winner of the 2021 Dobloug Prize (Norway)
Longlisted for the Prix Femina 2021 (France)
Winner of the Norwegian Critics’ Prize for Literature
Shortlisted for the Norwegian Booksellers’ PrizeIn a hotel, high up in a mountain village, two sisters aim to reconnect after distant years that contrast their close, almost twin-like upbringing. Martha has just been discharged from a sanatorium after a mental breakdown. Ella agrees to keep her company in the hope that the clean winter air will provide clarity—and a way back to their childhood connection.
It’s only when plans go awry, and Martha disappears in a rage, that Ella discovers a new sense of self outside her filial role. This identity is reinforced by various encounters: the hotel receptionist who takes her under her wing; the enigmatic love interest; the wistful, drunken Salvation Army soldier; the carpenter. And not least, Ella’s encounter with the writings of Stefan Zweig, which have a profound impact.
Mona Høvring’s award-winning novel Because Venus Crossed an Alpine on the Day that I Was Born is as sharp as it is sensitive; insightful as it is original when exploring the many distractions of the heart.
Belated Bris of the Brainsick
$18.95Belated Bris of the Brainsick traces 1) a belated and in some ways violent revelation about one’s ancestry and one’s past, 2) a resultant mental breakdown and 3) the pursuit of a new life with someone else who lives with mental illness. These events and the styles in which they are told are inflected by queer, transgender and disabled perspectives and aesthetics. If there is a narrative arc to the collection, it is not the usual one of falling ill and then regaining health; rather, it is the pursuit of a “queered” version of health.
Birding in the Glass Age of Isolation
$18.95Birding in the Glass Age of Isolation explores the experience and greater social implications of mental illness, specifically OCD and Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder. It asks the questions: How does anxiety inform both how we act and how we interpret those actions afterwards? How does the fear of retribution from one’s own mind lead to miscalculations or total inaction? Finally, how is one’s self-worth effaced in the balancing act between trying to do the right thing and doing nothing at all?
Birdspell
Shortlisted for the 2022 Mrs. Dunster’s Award for FictionCorbin Hayes has felt alone for as long as he can remember. His mom’s illness means lost jobs, constant moves, new schools and friendships that never get to grow. There’s a gap in his life that’s been waiting to be filled.
So, when a classmate offers Corbin the talking bird she can no longer keep, he’s stoked. But when things begin to spiral out of control, Corbin can no longer get his mom – or himself – through the dark period. At his lowest moment, he’s forced to do the one thing he fears the most.Corbin?s bipolar mother is often unemployed, and their apartment has no furniture, and sometimes no food. When his classmate offers Corbin the bird she can no longer keep, he?s all-in.
When things begin to spiral out of control and Corbin can no longer get his mom ? or himself ? through the darkness, he discovers his neighbors aren?t the unfriendly bunch he thought they were. Maybe this bird has a bit of magic in him.
Birdspell features celebrated author Valerie Sherrard?s trademark blend of humor and warmth. It?s a book about mental illness and poverty, but also hope, and the reminder that friends can be found anywhere.
Bitter Medicine
$23.95In 1976, Ben Martini was diagnosed with schizophrenia. A decade later, his brother Olivier was told he had the same disease. For the past thirty years the Martini family has struggled to comprehend and cope with a devastating illness, frustrated by a health care system lacking in resources and empathy, the imperfect science of medication, and the strain of mental illness on familial relationships.
Throughout it all, Olivier, an accomplished visual artist, drew. His sketches, comic strips, and portraits document his experience with, and capture the essence of, this all too frequently misunderstood disease. In Bitter Medicine, Olivier’s poignant graphic narrative runs alongside and communicates with a written account of the past three decades by his younger brother, award-winning author and playwright Clem Martini. The result is a layered family memoir that faces head-on the stigma attached to mental illness.
Shot through with wry humour and unapologetic in its politics, Bitter Medicine is the story of the Martini family, a polemical and poetic portrait of illness, and a vital and timely call for action.
BLEED
$24.95“A brilliant, blistering read.” — Heather O’Neill, author of When We Lost Our Heads
A scorching examination of how we treat endometriosis today
Have you ever been told that your pain is imaginary? That feeling better just takes yoga, CBD oil, and the blood of a unicorn on a full moon? That’s the reality of the more than 190 million people suffering the excruciating condition known as endometriosis. This disease affecting one in ten cis women and uncounted numbers of others is chronically overlooked, underfunded, and misunderstood — and improperly treated across the medical system. Discrimination and medical gaslighting are rife in endo care, often leaving patients worse off than when they arrived.
Journalist Tracey Lindeman knows it all too well. Decades of suffering from endometriosis propelled the creation of BLEED — part memoir, part investigative journalism, and all scathing indictment of how the medical system fails patients. Through extensive interviews and research, BLEED tracks the modern endo experience to the origins of medicine and how the system gained its power by marginalizing women. Using an intersectional lens, BLEED dives into how the system perpetuates misogyny, racism, classism, ageism, transphobia, fatphobia, and other prejudices to this day.
BLEED isn’t a self-help book. It’s an evidence file and an eye-opening, enraging read. It will validate those who have been gaslit, mistreated, or ignored by medicine and spur readers to fight for nothing short of revolution.
Blue Sonoma
$20.00A wise and embodied collection of dreamscapes, sutras and prayer poems from a writer at her peak
In Blue Sonoma, award-winning poet Jane Munro draws on her well-honed talents to address what Eliot called “the gifts reserved for age.” A beloved partner’s crossing into Alzheimer’s is at the heart of this book, and his “battered blue Sonoma” is an evocation of numerous other crossings: between empirical reportage and meditative apprehension, dreaming and wakefulness, Eastern and Western poetic traditions. Rich in both pathos and sharp shards of insight, Munro’s wisdom here is deeply embedded, shot through with moments of wit and candour. In the tradition of Taoist poets like Wang Wei and Po-Chu-i, her sixth and best book opens a wide poetic space, and renders difficult conditions with the lightest of touches.
Grey wood twisted tight
within the framework of the tree Ð
impossible to snap off,
forged as it dries.And in me, parts I can’t imagine
myself without Ð silvering.
~from “The live arbutus carries dead branches … ”
Bones
$20.00Poems about a young two-spirit Indigenous man moving through shadow and trauma toward strength and awareness.
Bones, Tyler Pennock’s wise and arresting debut, is about the ways we process the traumas of our past, and about how often these experiences eliminate moments of softness and gentleness. Here, the poems journey inward, guided by the world of dreams, seeking memories of a loving sister lost beneath layers of tragedy and abuse. With bravery, the poems stand up to the demons lurking in the many shadows of their lines, seeking glimpses of a good that is always just out of reach.
At moments heartrending and gut-punching, at others still and sweet, Bones is a collection of deep and painstaking work that examines the human spirit in all of us. This is a hero’s journey and a stark look at the many conditions of the soul. This is a book for survivors, for fighters, for dreamers, and for believers.
“Here is a spare and urgent voice that speaks of ‘wounds and beauty,’ that gestures to a story of trauma and abuse while offering us a potent journey of self-reckoning and reclamation. Bones entwines brutality with the deepest tenderness and in its clear-eyed way asks us, as poetry must, to re-see the world.” –Catherine Bush, author of Accusation and The Rules of Engagement
“Tyler Pennock’s poetry unfurls like breath: measured, light, caught, whispering, and vital. It charts memory with a steady hand and unerring allegiance to locating the ‘beauty/in terrible things.’ Bones addresses the effects of intergenerational, state-sponsored trauma with an enviable grace, inscribing and affirming life on the other side of overwhelming pain, abuse, and grief. It carries on, resilient, defiant, gazing at the stars, one breath at a time.” –Laurie D. Graham, author of Settler Education
“Tyler Pennock’s Bones is a soft meandering through the memories of the narrator’s hearthome: a place in which trauma, kinship, abuse, and nostalgia cradle one another in a circle. Here, poetics are deployed to inspect the most minute of objects with such wild abandon that the narrator transplants us into a world rife with sharpness so as to make the image complete, focussed, lifelike, photographic even as he continually ‘wish[es he] were like water’. Here we find memory and dream animated in equal measure: two spirits sitting in a basement, a headless mother, a white bear, wihtiko, and a sister slowly vanishing. Lyrical, witty, heart-wrenching, and empowering, Pennock’s debut book of poetry is a contemplative epic asking us to ponder the ethics of remembrance in all of its lacings of razing and revitalization.” –Joshua Whitehead, author of Full-Metal Indigiqueer and Jonny Appleseed
Borderline Shine
$19.99A therapist’s story of complex trauma and her remarkable journey to recovery.
When Connie Greshner was eight years old, her father walked into a bar in Ponoka, Alberta, and shot her mother. So began a young life defined by trauma. From Catholic boarding school in Kansas to the streets of the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver, Connie travelled in pursuit of acceptance and belonging. Grief, confusion, and shame manifested as depression, addiction, and promiscuity. Branded chronically suicidal with no hope of recovery by the mental health system, Connie was determined to heal herself and help others. Supported and inspired by exceptional friends, a love of books, and a connection to nature, she finally found her home, purpose, and peace.
In Borderline Shine, Connie breaks the silence and shame of intergenerational violence. With unflinching honesty she chronicles her unique journey through the darkness of suffering to the light of compassion, hope, and recovery.
Boys and Girls Screaming
When Ever’s father passes away suddenly, she is devastated. Not long after that, her mom has a stroke and Ever’s anguish becomes almost too much for her to handle. That’s when she gets the idea to form a group she calls Boys and Girls Screaming. Along with her brother, Jericho, and her best friend, Candace, Ever wants to bring together kids from their school who have suffered trauma so they can share their stories and begin to heal.
Although the other teens find solace in the group, Ever tumbles further into depression until she reaches a breaking point. As the group learns the true source of Ever’s pain, they jump into action to help her find a way out.
Boys and Girls Screaming tells the story of a generation of teens finding the support they need to process their trauma in their own ways.
When Ever?s father passes away suddenly, she is devastated. Not long after that, her mom has a stroke and Ever?s anguish becomes almost unbearable. That?s when she gets the idea to form a group she calls Boys and Girls Screaming. Ever brings together kids from their school who have suffered trauma so they can share their stories and begin to heal.
Although the others find solace in the group, Ever tumbles further into depression until she reaches a breaking point. As the group learns the true source of Ever?s pain, they jump into action to help her find a way out.
Bright Eyed
$14.95For forty years, RM Vaughan has been fighting, and failing, to get his forty winks each night. He’s not alone, not by any stretch.
More and more studies highlight the health risks of undersleeping, yet we have never been asked to do more, and for longer. And we can’t stop thinking that a lack of sleep is heroic: snoozing is a kind of laziness, after all. But why, when we know more about the value of sleep, are we obsessed with twentyÂ-four-Âhour workdays and deliberate sleep deprivation?
Working outward from his own experience, Vaughan explores this insomnia culture we’ve created, predicting a cultural collision — will we soon have to legislate rest, as France has done? — and wondering about the cause-and-Âeffect model of our shorter attention spans. Does the fact that we are almost universally underslept change how our world works? We know it’s an issue with, say, pilots and truck drivers, but what about artists– does an insomnia culture change creativity? And what are the longÂterm cultural consequences of this increasing sacriï¬?*ce for the everÂelusive goal of ‘total productivity’?
‘With his usual caustic wit and gut-churning insight, Vaughan guides us through pills, sleep clinics (where even the therapists don’t sleep) and the nightly nightmare of Restless Leg Syndrome. Interviewing long-term insomniacs, neuroscientists and Douglas Coupland, Vaughan battles an always-on culture – taking us right to the core of a dreamless empire.’
– Redfern Jon Barrett, author of The Giddy Death of the Gays & the Strange Demise of Straights‘RM Vaughan has taken his lifelong  affliction with insomnia and (dare I say it) made it funny and sexy.’ – Dr. Brian Goldman, host of CBC Radio’s White Coat, Black Art and author of The Secret Language of Doctors