Top 11 Books About Mental Health Updated 04 /2024

In the United States, there is a terrible flu pandemic. Frank, Polly's lover, falls ill, so she decides to take a one-way trip into the future in order to pay for his treatment. Polly is diverted to a time when America is split and she has no connections or money, so they arrange to meet up in the future. This is a beautiful and heart-wrenching narrative about time travel, dystopian society, the severity of surviving in a foreign planet, and the character study of a normal person struggling with all of it.

Willow Weep for Me: A Black Woman's Journey Through Depression

This year's lineup includes Toni Morrison, Stacey Abrams, Tina Turner, Kamala Harris, and more. In professions ranging from the arts to politics, black women have fulfilled a promise to never bow, never bend. The problem arises when a Black lady breaks like a delicate reed. As an expressionist poetry, Danquah's moving account of his journey through clinical depression is gripping. You can feel it in every fiber of your being.

An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

Jamison's progress in the field of manic-depressive psychology was meteoric until she put herself on the couch, tracing the dots between her blazing ambition and her hidden concerns. To conquer one's darker tendencies, the intellect must be restless and unyielding, as her classic 1995 memoir depicts struggles with neurological intricacies.

What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

In this conversational partnership between Oprah and a leading neuroscientist, Oprah and a leading neuroscientist conduct a deep dive into the legacy of childhood trauma.

Heavy: An American Memoir

For the first time, Kiese Laymon's poetic memoir cum epistle to his mother, a poverty-scarred addict who reared her overweight Black son in fits and starts, in an era of racial division in Mississippi, is a candid and courageous look at the debilitating effects of mental illness. It's a love letter to all the people who have survived.

The Mother of Black Hollywood: A Memoir

In the 1990s sitcom A Different World, Lewis was the Dean of Hillman College, and she had us all in her thrall. Bipolarity engulfed this Hollywood legend, but her followers were unaware of it. In an interview that's both feisty, feisty, and feisty, she talks about the delicate line between comedy and tragedy and her most demanding job ever — a position that she says she's never had before.

Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life

In this enchanting, delicate memoir, Li tells how her suicidal desires were overcome by a love of art and how she was able to return to a world of color and delight.

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us about Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

Author of the best-selling The Omnivore's Dilemma, America's favorite culinary expert, broadens our views by delving into the new field of psychedelic drugs as a treatment for severe depression in beautiful prose. One microdose a day can keep the doctor away, but is it really the best way to go about it?

The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

As a laureate of a prestigious literary award, Solomon's brilliant work picks up where Robert Burton's classic The Anatomy of Melancholy left off, encompassing everything from Renaissance treatises to today's news, and supported by a wealth of research and interviews with mental health professionals as well as biologists and social scientists.

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

People with alcoholism, divorce, addiction and PTSD form asymmetrical orbits around the common point of trauma, as depicted in the Venn diagram above. In this holistic yet scientific quest to mend the shattered self, a global specialist draws on resources from both East and West, including yoga and neuroplastic treatments as well as sports and drama.

The Unapologetic Guide to Black Mental Health: Navigate an Unequal System, Learn Tools for Emotional Wellness, and Get the Help You Deserve

Black populations bear an unjustifiably high share of the costs of healthcare, as evidenced by the COVID-19 epidemic, which has revealed massive healthcare disparities. An advocate lays forth a road map for people of color to master emotional wellness practices that ranges from the philosophical to the prophetic.

Back, After The Break – Osher Günsberg

It is clear that Osher has a deep commitment to mental health, and in this open book, the SANE patron recounts how he has battled with mental illness throughout his career as a radio and television host.

Anxiety, despair, and psychosis have all been part of Osher's past. He has also struggled with substance misuse, body dysmorphia, and other compulsions. He's figured out how to control his symptoms and still have a busy, social life. Just for the amusing footnotes, this is a must-read!

Everything Here Is Beautiful – Mira T. Lee

In this story about the impact of mental illness on friends, family, and caregivers, one sister begins to hear voices, while the other fights to find a way to support and protect her.

With a focus on the often-devastating impacts of mental illness and the relationships formed by family love, this film is frank and realistic while still being sincere and captivating.

An Angel At My Table: The Complete Autobiography – Janet Frame

She spent eight long years in New Zealand mental hospitals after being diagnosed at an early age with schizophrenia. The only thing keeping her from a lobotomy was the fact that a hospital official learned she had won a literary award while she was receiving a rudimentary kind of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT).

Psychiatrists later ruled that she never had schizophrenia and that she was free to go. For the rest of her life, she wrote novels, poems, and a three-part autobiography about her experiences with the concept of "madness."

Defying The Verdict: My Bipolar Life – Charita Cole Brown

A psychotic episode that resembled her grandmother's breakdown and hospitalization occurred to Charita Brown while she was in her final semester of college.

Bipolar disorder was later discovered as a result of this incident. Charita tells her story in her memoir, which is filled with love, hope, and success after she was diagnosed with cancer.

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