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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 17–32 of 72 results
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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 twenty-four-hour 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-effect 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 longterm cultural consequences of this increasing sacrifice for the ever elusive 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
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Care Work
$21.95Finalist, Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
In their new, long-awaited collection of essays, Lambda Literary Award-winning writer and longtime disability justice activist and performance artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha explores the politics and realities of disability justice, a movement that centres the lives and leadership of sick and disabled queer, trans, Black, and brown people, with knowledge and gifts for all. Leah writes passionately and personally about creating spaces by and for sick and disabled queer people of colour, and creative “collective access” — access not as a chore but as a collective responsibility and pleasure — in our communities and political movements. Bringing their survival skills and knowledge from years of cultural and activist work, Piepzna-Samarasinha explores everything from the economics of queer femme emotional labour, to suicide in queer and trans communities, to the nitty-gritty of touring as a sick and disabled queer artist of colour.
Care Work is a mapping of access as radical love, a celebration of the work that sick and disabled queer/people of colour are doing to find each other and to build power and community, and a toolkit for everyone who wants to build radically resilient, sustainable communities of liberation where no one is left behind. Powerful and passionate, Care Work is a crucial and necessary call to arms.
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Catch and Release
$20.00About coming out and coming of age.
In Catch and Release, twenty-one-year-old Lucca looks back on her childhood and adolescence as she comes to terms with both her sexual orientation and her mental illness. When she falls in love with the brilliant and beautiful Adèle, Lucca is forced to acknowledge not only that she is not and never has been straight, but also that her relationship with a teacher in high school was not as harmless as she might have thought.
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Chasing Zebras
$22.00When Margaret Nowaczyk immigrated to Canada with her family from Poland she was determined to be Canadian, whatever that meant, and she was equally determined to be a doctor. Arriving as a teen with an English vocabulary deeply influenced by the few English books she had, including Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil, Margaret made her way through medical school at the University of Toronto, followed by residencies at Toronto’s SickKids until she settled in at McMaster University Hospital as a clinical geneticist. From leaving Communist Poland to enduring the demands of medical school, through living with a long undiagnosed mental illness to discovering the fascinating field of genetics, plunging into the pressures of prenatal diagnosis and finally finding the tools of writing and of narrative medicine, Margaret shares a journey that is both inspiring and harrowing. This is a story of constant effort, of growth, of tragedy and of triumph, and most of all, of the importance of openness. In the end, Dr. Nowaczyk invites us all to see that “life is precious and fragile and wondrous and full of mistakes.” And to keep trying.
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Coconut
$19.95In her debut collection, Canadian National Slam Champion Nisha Patel commands her formidable insight and youthful, engaged voice to relay experiences of racism, sexuality, empowerment, grief, and love. These are vitally political, feminist poems for young women of colour, with bold portrayals of confession, hurt, and healing.
Coconut rises fiercely like the sun. These poems bestow light and warmth and the ability to witness the world, but they ask for more than basking; they ask readers to grow and warn that they can be burnt. Above all, Nisha Patel’s work questions and challenges propriety and what it means to be a good woman, second-generation immigrant, daughter, consumer, and lover.
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Conscious Grief & Loss Guide
$21.95None of us want to experience the loss of a loved one, but the sad reality is we’ve all experienced it, and it is certain that grief will come knocking many times throughout our lives. A psychotherapist for more than twenty years, Lise Leblanc has learned that we are rarely fully prepared for a loved one’s death or our reaction to it. Like so many others, you may not know how to deal with the emotions, communication problems, and other complexities that arise in times of grief and loss.
Although this book cannot take your suffering away, Conscious Grief & Loss Guide will provide you with deep insights and effective strategies. It will answer many of your questions while guiding you to achieve an optimum state of wellness throughout your grief journey.
Lise carefully constructs a step-by-step, profound yet practical approach to help you understand your grief, assess your mental and emotional state, recognize your self-care needs, find helpful resources, and communicate productively during highly emotional and painful times.
- This book includes:
- -concrete examples
- -real-life stories
- -useful exercises
- -reflective questions
- -insights and strategies
You may never be able to embrace grief with open arms, but perhaps you can learn to accept it as a necessary part of having the gift of loving someone who makes saying goodbye so difficult.
This book is the ideal companion to other books in the “Wish I Knew” series. -
Dear Scarlet
$19.95Longlisted for Canada Reads; Finalist, City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize
In this intimate and moving graphic memoir, Teresa Wong writes and illustrates the story of her struggle with postpartum depression in the form of a letter to her daughter Scarlet. Equal parts heartbreaking and funny, Dear Scarlet perfectly captures the quiet desperation of those suffering from PPD and the profound feelings of inadequacy and loss. As Teresa grapples with her fears and anxieties and grasps at potential remedies, coping mechanisms, and her mother’s Chinese elixirs, we come to understand one woman’s battle against the cruel dynamics of postpartum depression.
Dear Scarlet is a poignant and deeply personal journey through the complexities of new motherhood, offering hope to those affected by PPD, as well as reassurance that they are not alone.
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Different Minds
$14.95Lorna Drew thought her partner was carrying his absent-minded professor status too far, until he was diagnosed with Alzheimer Disease.
A thoughtful memoir and a wide-ranging handbook, Different Minds is an illuminating side-by-side account of life with Alzheimer Disease. Prepared with the assistance of the Alzheimer Society of New Brunswick, it offers practical advice on everything from reorganizing finances to dealing with emotions.
In intimate journal entries, Lorna expresses how hard she finds being both partner and caregiver, while Leo shares knowledge gathered from experience and extensive reading. His vivid descriptions of how a person fighting Alzheimer Disease interprets his strange new world are invaluable to people newly diagnosed with this disease and to their loved ones and caregivers.
Featuring a detailed bibliography, a list of useful Web sites and helpful suggestions like making checklists, how to stay active or where to look for support, Different Minds is a unique guide to coping with mutual distress while enjoying life together.
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Dragonfly
$15.95In this original and poetic new work, Lara Rae tells the raw and heartfelt story of her half-century long (and counting) gender odyssey. Dragonfly presents us with two actors, one male, one female, who illuminate the inner life of a trans woman from her Scottish childhood in the 1960s to the present day. Matching our inside to our outside is always hard, but for trans people it’s often a matter of life and death. Stripping away the visual cues that both define and imprison transgender people, Dragonfly is a call to all of us to forge creativity from chaos. So often, it is the external changes in trans lives that the world is exposed to and confronts. Here as Lara says, is the “inside voice” of a trans child, ever present, ever demanding to be heard, ever rising upward, to growth, peace, security and love.
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Dysphoria
$16.95A heart-rending poetic commentary on the pain, anxiety and dissatisfaction that go hand-in-hand with mental illness, and on the complex and emotional interplay between doctor, patient and outsider.
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Falling Into Flight
$19.95Falling into Flight untangles a daughter’s complicated relationship with immigrant parents — her angry Russian mother and quiet Finnish father — as she grapples with the mysteries of her own body and self during the long years of growing up. And it offers insight into a life experienced through the arts: first as a young enthusiastic dancer, then as a thoughtful — and equally enthusiastic — dance critic.
After her parents die within months of each other, Kaija begins to experience increasingly debilitating physical ailments that have no clear diagnosis. Finally, after many referrals to specialists, her doctor suggests psychotherapy to get at the root of the symptoms. Initially reluctant and disbelieving, Kaija embarks on a fiveyear journey into a past that she has long suppressed.
Along the way, the reader is taken not only into the often baffling and troubling world of her childhood, dominated by a tragic and unpredictable mother, but also into the magical world of dance. Kaija’s passion for moving fully in time and space brings a pulse to the words on the page, taking the reader inside the extravagant steps and shapes of dance — and also inside the very contemporary struggles of perfectionism and anxiety, which together wield such power to both inspire and damage.
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Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars
$16.95At once a love letter and challenge to the traditional transgender memoir, Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars is a playful, surrealist dance through queer coming of age.
A haunted young girl (who happens to be a kung-fu expert and pathological liar) runsaway from an oppressive city, where the sky is always grey, in search of love and sisterhood–and finds herself in a magical place known only as the Street of Miracles.There, she is quickly adopted into a vigilante gang of glamorous warrior femmes called the Lipstick Lacerators, whose mission is to scour the Street of violent men and avenge murdered trans women everywhere. But when disaster strikes, can our intrepid heroine find the truth within herself in order to protect her new family and heal her broken heart?
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Flyway
$18.00This Meditation on the impact of human and ecological trauma explores the cost of survival for three generations of women living between empires. Writing from within the disappearing tallgrass prairie, Sarah Ens follows connections between the Russian Mennonite diaspora and the disrupted migratory patterns of grassland birds. Drawing on family history, eco-poetics, and the rich tradition of the Canadian long poem, Flyway migrates along pathways of geography and the heart to grapple with complexities of home.
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Fuse
$20.00Drawing on her own experiences as a woman of Iranian and British Isle descent, writer Hollay Ghadery dives into conflicts and uncertainty surrounding the bi-racial female body and identity, especially as it butts up against the disparate expectations of each culture. Painfully and at times, reluctantly, Fuse probes and explores the documented prevalence of mental health issues in bi-racial women.
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Going Under
$19.95They say depression feels like drowning from the inside. Welcome to the aftermath of a mental breakdown.
Sophie is trying to mend the pieces of her broken life. The people around her think she is “cured,” but she knows she still has a long way to go before she truly feels “better.”Going Under is not a story as much as a process, fragments of a personal journey collected in order to make sense of an experience that can feel impossible to describe. D drawn in a minimalist, reserved style, this award-winning graphic novel mirrors the feelings of the protagonist–centering the narrative around images to convey powerful emotions when words fail.
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Hidden Lives
$19.95A revised and updated edition of a collection of personal essays that illuminate what life is like for those who live with mental illness, and how it impacts their family members.
More than 4 million Canadians and 57 million Americans suffer from a diagnosable mental illness, and yet there are still considerable stigmas and a great deal of misunderstanding surrounding even the most common diagnoses—schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, clinical depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and dissociative identity disorder.
Rather than analyze the diagnoses and symptoms, these first-hand accounts focus on the very essence of a psycho-emotional breakdown, and respond to the mental, physical, and emotional turmoil it inevitably causes. What does a mother do when her teenage son’s personality suddenly fractures? How does a police officer cope when his employer refuses to provide adequate care until he can prove his PTSD is work-related? How do children grow up under the care of a manic father whose illness lands him in and out of medical and social incarceration?
Raw, honest, and painful, these essays communicate disappointment and despair, but also courage and compassion. They offer a lifeline for sufferers and support for their friends and family, and promote new and improved attitudes toward those with mental illness.
With a foreword by respected physician, bestselling author, and renowned speaker Dr. Gabor Maté, Hidden Lives gives readers a place to turn, and provides a platform to share their struggle.