What do you do when your mental health needs a boost? From expert advice on how to cope with anxiety and depression, to first-person essays and memoirs, Stylist's Frame Of Mind series has something for everyone.
A good mental health book should be easy to understand and keep you engaged page after page. Choose one with a style that resonates with you, whether it’s wit and humor or anecdotes backed by science.
Bryony Gordon’s Reasons To Stay Alive
From Telegraph columnist Bryony Gordon comes this shocking, funny, unpredictable, heart-wrenching, raw and jaw-droppingly truthful celebration of life with mental illness. Known for her distinctive warmth and wry humour, Gordon reveals her struggles with OCD (a condition that makes you think you’ve murdered someone) and depression – and how living with these mental illnesses has helped to shape her life.
A must-read for anyone who has ever wondered how to keep on living a good life, Reasons To Stay Alive will help you to see the world in a more balanced and positive light. It covers everything from sleep, news, social media, addiction and work to play and is sure to change the way you view life and the world around you.
Mad Girl
A Sunday Times bestseller, Mad Girl is the raw, heart-wrenching, shocking, funny and unpredictable story of mental illness from Bryony Gordon. For her friends she was the fun, flighty writer-about-town, but for herself it was a world of OCD, depression, bulimia and drug dependency.
She decided that keeping silent about her demons gave them a status they didn’t deserve, so she wrote this book with her trademark wit and dazzling honesty. It is a watershed of a book, shining daylight onto the dark secrets of mental illness.
Dr Julie Smith’s Why I’m OK
Originally from Ringwood, Dr Julie Smith is a clinical psychologist with over ten years’ experience. She was the first professional to use TikTok to give mental health insights and her bite-size self-help videos have clocked up around half a billion views across social media platforms.
A true social media sensation, she has more than three million followers and is known for her empathic combination of humour and connection. Why I’m OK is a slick resource that understands its audience and delivers clear, engaging advice in bite-sized entries that are easy to read thanks to illustrations and varied font sizes. Whether you are looking to find ways to cope with stress, manage anxiety, boost your confidence or learn to forgive yourself, it’s here to help.
Ruby Wax’s Sane New World
Ruby Wax is one of the UK’s most popular comedians. She is also a mental health campaigner, having battled depression herself and successfully found coping strategies to combat it.
In Sane New World, Wax combines the usual witty banter with a more serious approach to her own mental health. She has gone to Oxford and completed a masters in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, in order to understand the brain better.
She aims to give her readers the best way to deal with their own mental health issues. This is a very interesting book that can help you better understand your own mind, as well as providing some useful tools to improve your general mental wellbeing.
Lori Gottlieb’s Maybe You Should Talk To Someone
From New York Times best-selling author Lori Gottlieb comes Maybe You Should Talk To Someone, a hilarious and candid memoir that takes readers behind the scenes of a therapist’s world. Licensed therapist Lori Gottlieb, who is also a national advice columnist, shares her experiences with therapy from both the patients’ and her own perspectives.
As she navigates the complexities of a client’s life, Gottlieb discovers that therapy often offers us much more than we expect. It’s not only about dealing with a certain issue but more often than not it’s about uncovering the deepest and most hidden issues that may be at the root of the problem in the first place.