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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 49–64 of 72 results
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Set-Point
$20.00Set-Point is humorously dry, insightful, and an understated portrait of a complex personal landscape.
Lucy is a 20-something old aspiring screenwriter who takes up digital sex-work to pay the bills. Circulating a confused social atmosphere of half-engagement with lovers, friends, and co-workers in present-day Montreal, Lucy struggles with her self image, an eating disorder, and the illness of her mother.
Haunted by self-doubt and a desire to believe in her work and worth, Lucy volleys between self-sabotage and ambition as she tries to develop a parodic script set within a massive multiplayer world-building game. She is thrown into amplified chaos when one of her sex-work clients threatens to dox her.
Set-Point is a novel about nothing. Or, not nothing, but certainly emptiness: the emptiness of virtual realities; of endless parody; of cartoon porn; of a purged stomach or a missing body part. Here, in Fawn Parker?s savagely ?chill? Montreal, student art, friendship, therapy, work, and relationships are cast as light as dust ? a discordant counterpoint to Lucy?s fierce internal world of self-loathing, ego, and worry over her mother?s illness. It will make you feel like your old self again. Neurotic, paranoid, totally inadequate, completely insecure. It?s a pleasure. ? Spencer Gordon, author of Cosmo
True to her name, Lucy Frank shines an iPhone-like beam of lucidity on impossible beauty standards, Sisyphean dead-end jobs, tepid hookups, and noncommittal on-off relationships with friends and erotic partners. When her worlds collide and collapse, she seeks to escape, as if in a fairy-tale turned nightmare, from her own digital ?breadcrumb trail.? To anomie and alienation reminiscent of Ottessa Moshfegh, candour that rivals Sally Rooney, and an explicitness suggestive of early Mary Gaitskill, Fawn Parker adds her own antic, absurdist, utterly distinctive sensibility. Set-Point takes us to the very edge of identity, virtual and lived. ? Kateri Lanthier, author of Reporting from Night
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Still Living the Edges: A Disabled Women’s Reader
$39.95<More than a decade after the publication of Living the Edges: A Disabled Woman’s Reader, the lives of women with disabilities have not changed much. Still Living the Edges provides a timely follow-up that traces the ways disabled women are still on the edges, whether that be on the cutting edge, being pushed to the edges of society, or challenging the edges?the barriers in their way. This collection brings together the diverse voices of women with various disabilities, both physical and mental, from nations such as Canada, the United States, Australia, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Zimbabwe. Through articles, poetry, essays, and visual art, disabled women share their experiences with employment, relationships, body image, sexuality and family life, society’s attitudes, and physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. In their own voices, they explore their identity as women with disabilities, showcasing how they continue to challenge the physical and attitudinal barriers that force them to the edges of society and instead place themselves at the centre of new and emerging narratives about disability.
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Sunrise over Half-Built Houses
$26.00Enter into the life and mind of a shy teenager coming of age in the early 2000s in a pretty, suburban neighbourhood where nothing is quite as it seems—including her. At a glance, she’s a student with a boyfriend and a job at the coffee shop. Yet she’s skipping class, grappling with intense feelings for girls and growing dangerously dependent on illicit pills with cute names.
Wanting nothing more than to be who she is on the inside, Erin Steele’s spiral into addiction and parallel quest for meaning takes readers into big houses with spare room for secrets; past quiet cul-de-sacs where kids party in wooded outskirts zoned for development; where West Coast rains can pummel for days.
Written with searing honesty that stares at you until you turn away, then stares at you some more, Sunrise over Half-Built Houses digs down past pleasantries and manicured lawns, through the sucking hole of addiction, then further still to reveal a place where we can all see ourselves and each other more clearly. -
Suture
$20.00To make her films, Eva must take out her eyes and use them as batteries. To make her art, Finn must cut open her chest and remove her lungs and heart. To write her novels, Grace must use her blood to power the word processor.
Suture shares three interweaving stories of artists tearing themselves open to make art. Each artist baffles their family, or harms their loved ones, with their necessary sacrifices. Eva’s wife worries about her mental health; Finn’s teenager follows in her footsteps, using forearm bones for drumsticks; Grace’s network constantly worries about the prolific writer’s penchant for self-harm, and the over-use of her vitals for art.
The result is a hyper-real exploration of the cruelties we commit and forgive in ourselves and others. Brewer brings a unique perspective to mental illness while exploring how support systems in relationships—spousal, parental, familial—can be both helpful and damaging.
This exciting debut novel is a highly original meditation on the fractures within us, and the importance of empathy as medicine and glue.
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Tear
$22.95WINNER OF THE 2023 KOBO EMERGING WRITER PRIZE
A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF 2022
49TH SHELF EDITOR’S PICK FOR SEPTEMBER 2022
A reclamation of female rage and a horrifyingly deformed Bildungsroman.
Frances is quiet and reclusive, so much so that her upstairs roommates sometimes forget she exists. Isolated in the basement, and on the brink of graduating from university, Frances herself starts to question the realities of her own existence. She can’t remember there being a lock on the door at the top of the basement stairs—and yet, when she turns the knob, the door won’t open. She can’t tell the difference between her childhood memories, which bloom like flowers in the dark basement, and her dreams. Worse still, she can’t ignore the very real tapping sound now coming—insistently, violently—threatening to break through her bedroom wall.
With the thematic considerations of Mary Shelley and Shirley Jackson’s work, and in the style of Herta Muller and Daisy Johnson, Tear is both a horrifyingly deformed Bildungsroman and a bristling reclamation of female rage. Blurring the real and the imagined, this lyric debut novel unflinchingly engages with contemporary feminist issues and explores the detrimental effects of false narratives, gaslighting, and manipulation on young women.
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The Adjustment League
$19.95Prompted by a mysterious summons from his past, a man known only as ?The Super? begins an investigation into maternal neglect by a privileged Toronto family. As the case deepens, revealing a web of systemic crime and depravity, The Super undertakes a series of adjustments: his word for the personal interventions that he conducts on behalf of the powerless. These increasingly chaotic retributions soon pull him into a spiral of brutal violence.
Working within six-to-eight week windows of “hyper-time”—periods of near-sleepless activity and hyper-awareness that precede his own mental collapse—The Super draws closer to the heart of the case he was called upon to resolve. But at what cost to his own sanity?
Reminiscent of Stieg Larsson and Dennis Lehane, The Adjustment League is a gripping, unforgettable novel about the effects that cruelty, wealth, and power have on the weakest members of society.
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The Becoming
$22.95The Becoming is a brutal account of mental illness by a woman who doesn’t believe in mental illness. As the author embarks on a PhD at the University of Oxford, a lifetime of addiction, eating disorders, and trauma culminates in an explosive hospital stay that sees her achieve liberation through psychosis. Her journey from terror to acceptance is grueling, and she makes meaning of it by weaving reflexive narrative with classic and nascent scholarship. Part phenomenological recounting, part social critique, the text disrupts biomedical approaches to altered states by exploring their emancipatory potential. It also illuminates how conventional mental health treatment pathologizes human suffering. In doing so, The Becoming contributes to anti-psychiatry and Mad studies projects, each asking, “What does it mean to be normal?” and “Should we be sane in an insane world?”
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The Chemical Life
$17.95Praised for his darkly psychological accounts of extreme experiences, Jim Johnstone’s fifth book of poems explores his most difficult terrain to date: mental illness and addiction. Like Coleridge’s opium dreams, Johnstone’s narratives in The Chemical Life are hallucinatory, coloured by his use of both prescription and recreational drugs. Returning often to the notion of rival realities–“in everything, there is a second state”–Johnstone is brilliantly disruptive and disorientating; a poet whose savagely austere forms, electrically precise images and keyed-up rhythms reveal an obsession with the mind-altering properties of language itself.
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The Cure of Folly
$22.95Have you ever wondered what goes on in a psychiatrist’s head while he is analyzing a patient? How do you learn to be a psychiatrist? Is there a cure for madness? Does Prozac work? Are people naturally crazy?
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The Death Scene Artist
$20.00M_____ is dying of cancer. Only thirty-two, an extra with a meagre list of credits to their name and afraid of being forgotten, M_____ starts recounting the strange, fantastic and ultimately tragic path of their love affair with the world’s greatest living “redshirt” – a man who has died or appeared dead in nearly eight hundred film and television roles.
In a compelling narrative of blog entries interspersed with film script excerpts, The Death Scene Artist immerses readers in a three-act surrealist exploration of the obsessive fault-finding of body dysmorphia and the dangerous desires of a man who has lived several hundred half-minute lives without having ever experienced his own.
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The Door at the End of Everything
$19.99Written while Lynda Monahan was hospital writer-in-residence at the Victoria Hospital in Prince Albert, working often on the adult and youth mental health wards, the tight, pared poems in The Door at the End of Everything give voice to and honour those living with mental illness, speaking to not only the suffering but also the courage and hope that is so clearly there as well.
Several of the poems and poetry sequences have seen publication in various literary journals, including Grain, The Society, The New Quarterly, Transition, Bareback, and Dalhousie Review, and in the poetry anthologies Writing Menopause (Inanna Publications), Lummox Anthology of Canadian Poetry, Worth More Standing (Caitlin Press), the Apart pandemic anthology (Saskatchewan Writers Guild), and Line Dance (Burton House Books), and in various tanka publications such as Atlas Poetica, A Hundred Gourds, and Gusts. A series of online readings from this collection, created with the help of a Canada Council grant, are available on YouTube.
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The Genius Hour Project
$16.95Eleven-year-old Frazzy is mostly coping with not quite fitting in at school, until all the good stuff in her life goes haywire.
Frazzy likes to chat her way through her school day, distracting her best friend Mel while secretly eyeing the boy she has a crush on — all without attracting any more attention from Jake the bully. When her teacher springs a yearlong assignment on her class called The Genius Hour Project, Frazzy sees it as her ticket to “normal-ville.” By choosing “the most boring topic ever,” she tries to please everyone except herself — with disastrous results. Meanwhile, Frazzy’s BFF might be moving to a different school, and Frazzy’s dad, just when she needs him most, disappears into a major depression.
How can Frazzy be true to her own quirky self and survive all the challenges that life is throwing at her? That’s the question at the heart of The Genius Hour Project.
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The Red Word
$19.95Winner of the 2018 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction
The battle of the sexes goes to college in this nervy debut adult novel by a powerful new voice
A smart, dark, and take-no-prisoners look at rape culture and the extremes to which ideology can go The Red Word is a campus novel like no other. As her sophomore year begins, Karen enters into the back-to-school revelry — particularly at Gamma Beta Chi. When she wakes up one morning on the lawn of Raghurst, a house of radical feminists, she gets a crash course in the state of feminist activism on campus. The frat known as GBC is notorious, she learns, nicknamed “Gang Bang Central” and a prominent contributor to a list of rapists compiled by female students. Despite continuing to party there and dating one of the brothers, Karen is equally seduced by the intellectual stimulation and indomitable spirit of the Raghurst women, who surprise her by wanting her as a housemate and recruiting her into the upper-level class of a charismatic feminist mythology scholar they all adore. As Karen finds herself caught between two increasingly polarized camps, ringleader housemate Dyann believes she has hit on the perfect way to expose and bring down the fraternity as a symbol of rape culture — but the war between the houses will exact a terrible price.
The Red Word captures beautifully the feverish binarism of campus politics and the headlong rush of youth toward new friends, lovers, and life-altering ideas. With strains of Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, Alison Lurie’s Truth and Consequences, and Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons, Sarah Henstra’s debut adult novel arrives on the wings of furies.
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The Unravelling
$23.95A memoir, told through illustrations and text, of one family’s journey through mental illness, dementia, caregiving, and the health care system.
Olivier Martini and his mother, Catherine, have lived together since he was diagnosed with schizophrenia thirty-six years ago. It hasn’t always been a perfect living situation, but it’s worked — Catherine has been able to help Olivier through the ups and downs of living with a mental illness, and Olivier has been able to care for his aging mother as her mobility becomes limited, and Olivier’s brothers Clem and Nic have been able to provide support to both as well. But then Olivier experiences a health crisis at the exact same time that his mother starts slipping into dementia.
The Martini family’s lifelong struggle with mental illness is suddenly complicated immeasurably as they begin to navigate the convoluted world of assisted living and long-term care. With anger, dry humour, and hope, The Unravelling tells the story of one family’s journey with mental illness, dementia, and caregiving, through a poignant graphic narrative from Olivier accompanied by text from his brother, award-winning playwright and novelist Clem Martini.
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The Untranslatable I
$20.00In unmeaningable, her previous Trillium Poetry Awards winning book with Gordon Hill Press, Roxanna Bennett renovated the North American disability poetics canon via her queer fusion of invisible and visible disability identities. The Untranslatable I builds on Roxanna’s acute sense of form and cripping of myth by establishing a more reflective, heartbreaking voice that asks, “Was I chosen? Is this a gift or a curse?” and provides answers not as prescribed path or cure, but as beautiful song.
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The Woo-Woo
$21.952019 CANADA READS FINALIST
Shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust of Canada Prize for Nonfiction; Winner, Hubert Evans Nonfiction Prize; Longlisted for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour
In this jaw-dropping, darkly comedic memoir, a young woman comes of age in a dysfunctional Asian family who blame their woes on ghosts and demons when they should really be on anti-psychotic meds.
Lindsay Wong grew up with a paranoid schizophrenic grandmother and a mother who was deeply afraid of the “woo-woo” — Chinese ghosts who come to visit in times of personal turmoil. From a young age, she witnessed the woo-woo’s sinister effects; when she was six, Lindsay and her mother avoided the dead people haunting their house by hiding out in a mall food court, and on a camping trip, in an effort to rid her daughter of demons, her mother tried to light Lindsay’s foot on fire.
The eccentricities take a dark turn, however, and when Lindsay starts to experience symptoms of the woo-woo herself, she wonders whether she will suffer the same fate as her family.
At once a witty and touching memoir about the Asian immigrant experience and a harrowing and honest depiction of the vagaries of mental illness, The Woo-Woo is a gut-wrenching and beguiling manual for surviving family, and oneself.