Mental Health Awareness Month was first recognized by Mental Health America (then called the National Association for Mental Health) in May of 1949. Its purpose is to educate the public about widespread mental illnesses such as depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder, which affect millions of Americans, yet are often overlooked, stigmatized, and misunderstood. If you’d like to learn more about various aspects of mental health, here are some new & notable books you can check out using your Livingston Library card. (Descriptions provided by the publishers.)

Healing the Modern Brain: Nine Tenets to Build Mental Fitness and Revitalize Your Mind by Drew Ramsey, MD

The human brain–the complex organ responsible for our thoughts, feelings, and actions–has long been misunderstood. Dr. Drew Ramsey argues that to heal our brains, we must start considering conditions like depression, anxiety, ADHD and addiction–and the patients living with them–more holistically. Healing the Modern Brain offers a new approach to revitalizing and protecting mental health and achieving Mental Fitness. Simply defined, Mental Fitness is the knowledge, patterns, habits, and skills that culminate in a more mentally healthy life: an approach to living that takes into consideration the unrealistic demands of modern living, time, choice, genetics, lifestyle, diet, habits, chemistry, movement, rest, and mindset. It is a process that will put your brain in a perpetual state of self-repair and evolution, and ensure it has the support it needs to overcome daily stress, decision-fatigue, and uncertainty.

The Inherited Mind: A Story of Family, Hope, and the Genetics of Mental Illness by James Longman

James Longman was a preteen in boarding school when his dad, who was diagnosed with depression and schizophrenia, died by suicide. As he got older, James’s own bouts of depression spurred him to examine how his father’s mental health might have affected his own. He engaged with experts to uncover the science behind what is inherited, how much environmental factors can impact genetic traits, and how one can overcome a familial history of mental illness and trauma.

The Silicon Shrink: How Artificial Intelligence Made the World an Asylum by Daniel Oberhaus

AI psychiatrists promise to detect mental disorders with superhuman accuracy, provide affordable therapy for those who can’t afford or can’t access treatment, and even invent new psychiatric drugs. But the hype obscures an unnerving reality. In The Silicon Shrink, Daniel Oberhaus tells the inside story of how the quest to use AI in psychiatry has created the conditions to turn the world into an asylum. Most of these systems, he writes, have vanishingly little evidence that they improve patient outcomes, but the risks they pose have less to do with technological shortcomings than the application of deeply flawed psychiatric models of mental disorder at unprecedented scale. 

Oberhaus became interested in the subject of mental health after tragically losing his sister to suicide. In the book, he argues that these new, ostensibly therapeutic technologies already pose significant risks to vulnerable people, and they won’t stop there. These new breeds of AI systems are creating a psychiatric surveillance economy in which the emotions, behavior, and cognition of everyday people are subtly manipulated by psychologically savvy algorithms that have escaped the clinic. Oberhaus also introduces readers to the concept of “swipe psychology,” which is quickly establishing itself as the dominant mode of diagnosing and treating mental disorders.

It is not too late to change course, but to do so means we must reckon with the nature of mental illness, the limits of technology, and what it means to be human.

The DOSE Effect: Optimize Your Brain and Body by Boosting Your Dopamine, Oxytocin, Serotonin, and Endorphins by TJ Power

The brain’s ability to change and adapt is one of the most powerful tools we can harness to improve our lives. Renowned neuroscientist and co-founder of Neurify, TJ Power, believes in the human ability to optimize and rewire brain chemistry to unlock one’s full potential. However, to do so, one must first implement a series of practical, life-changing strategies. The DOSE Effect reveals the secrets of our brain chemistry, offering simple and accessible ways to make modifications to your lifestyle that can transform your brain. Drawing on cutting-edge science, Power explores how biohacking your brain can not only enhance cognitive performance but also improve the aspects of your life that ultimately control a happier, healthier, and more productive lifestyle.

Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance by Laura Delano

The powerful memoir of one woman’s experience with psychiatric diagnoses and medication, and her journey to discover her true self outside the mental health system At age thirteen, Laura Delano’s parents brought her to her first psychiatrist who quickly diagnosed her with bipolar disorder and started her on a treatment of psychiatric drugs. At school, Delano was the model student, earning straight-As, a national squash ranking, and elected president of her class; at home, she unleashed all the rage she felt, lashing out at her family and locking herself in her bedroom, contemplating her death. Delano’s initial bipolar diagnosis marked the beginning of a life-altering saga. 

For the next fourteen years, she sought treatment at the country’s best psychiatric hospitals, collected an expanding catalog of diagnoses, and was prescribed a medication cascade of twenty-one drugs. Delano welcomed the pharmaceutical regimen in the hopes that it would bring her stability, peace, and treatment for what she’d been convinced was an incurable, lifelong disease. But as her symptoms became more severe and untenable, and eventually deemed “treatment resistant,” she started to wonder if the drugs she was prescribed were contributing to her illness. After years of being an obedient patient, Delano made the radical decision to uncover her baseline–the unadulterated state-of-being where she could experience the full intensity of feelings that she’d never truly known: happiness, sadness, anger, desire, and joy. It was a decision that would require her to leave behind the diagnoses and the drugs, all she had known for the better part of her life. 

Weaving Delano’s medical records and doctors’ notes from her time in treatment with illuminating research on the drugs she was prescribed, Unshrunk questions the dominant, rarely critiqued role that the American mental health industry, and the pharmaceutical industry in particular, plays in shaping what it means to be human.

Notes to John by Joan Didion

In November 1999, Joan Didion began seeing a psychiatrist because, as she wrote to a friend, her family had had “a rough few years.” She described the sessions in a journal she created for her husband, John Gregory Dunne.

For several months, Didion recorded conversations with the psychiatrist in meticulous detail. The initial sessions focused on alcoholism, adoption, depression, anxiety, guilt, and the heartbreaking complexities of her relationship with her daughter, Quintana. The subjects evolved to include her work, which she was finding difficult to maintain for sustained periods. There were discussions about her own childhood—misunderstandings and lack of communication with her mother and father, her early tendency to anticipate catastrophe—and the question of legacy, or, as she put it, “what it’s been worth.” The analysis would continue for more than a decade.

Didion’s journal was crafted with the singular intelligence, precision, and elegance that characterize all of her writing. It is an unprecedentedly intimate account that reveals sides of her that were unknown, but the voice is unmistakably hers—questioning, courageous, and clear in the face of a wrenchingly painful journey.

Go Higher: Five Practices for Purpose, Success, and Inner Peace by Big Sean

Sean Anderson, better known as Big Sean, has reached incredible levels of success in his music career. And while, from the outside, his life looks like a collection of enviable achievements, in truth, he has experienced the highest highs and the lowest lows that come with anxiety and depression.

Go Higher dares to ask the question: If we worked on our self-care regularly, instead of only when we were in crisis, how much higher could we go? Filled with step-by-step instructions for the tools Sean has been using on a daily basis for the last decade–journaling, agreements, affirmations, and meditation, as well as prompts to guide you on your own journey of self-reflection, Go Higher is a spiritual guidebook for our times, proving that investing in yourself isn’t something that drains your energy, but is something that gives you the energy to reach your fullest potential.

Outofshapeworthlessloser by Gracie Gold

In this explosive tell-all memoir, an Olympic figure skater reveals her battle to survive mental illness, eating disorders, and the self-destructive voice inside that she calls “outofshapeworthlessloser.” When Gracie Gold stepped onto center stage (or ice, rather) as America’s sweetheart at the 2014 Sochi Olympics, she instantly became the face of America’s most beloved winter sport. Beautiful, blonde, Midwestern, and media-trained, she was suddenly being written up everywhere from The New Yorker to Teen Vogue to People and baking cookies with Taylor Swift. But little did the public know what Gold was facing when the cameras were off. 

In 2017, she entered treatment for what was publicly announced as an eating disorder and anxiety treatment but was, in reality, suicidal ideation. While Gold’s public star was rising, her private life was falling apart: Cracks within her family were widening, her bulimia was getting worse, and she became a survivor of sexual assault. The pressure of training for years with demanding coaches and growing up in a household that accepted nothing less than gold had finally taken its toll. 

Now Gold reveals the exclusive and harrowing story of her struggles in and out of the pressure-packed world of elite figure skating: the battles with her family, her coaches, the powers-that-be at her federation, and her deteriorating mental health. Told with unflinching honesty and stirring defiance, Outofshapeworthlessloser is not only a forceful reckoning from a world-class athlete but also an intimate account of surviving as a young woman in a society that rewards appearances more than anything and demands perfection at all costs.

–Joe, Adult Services & Acquisitions