The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath's only novel, published in London in 1963 under a pseudonym, about a gifted young woman's slide into depression after a summer internship in New York. It remains the benchmark for depression in fiction.
Tag: Mental Health
Mental health as it actually shows up in demanding lives: stress, burnout, anxiety, and the quiet work of staying steady. These pieces treat it plainly, as something everyone navigates, not a weakness to hide.
Book ReviewsLove’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy
Irvin Yalom's 1989 collection of ten case stories from his psychotherapy practice. It reads like short fiction, it's unusually honest about the therapist's own mistakes, and it's the book I point clinicians to when they ask how to write about…
ADHDWorld Mental Health Day: Nothing Was Wrong With Me
World Mental Health Day is October 10, and the 2026 theme asks for lived experience. Here's mine: thousands of hours of therapy looking for what was wrong with me, a late AuDHD diagnosis, and the relief of learning I just…
HealingCan Writing a Memoir Make You Sick? The Toll Nobody Warns You About
Writing a memoir can wear you down physically and emotionally, even decades after the events. A client who had to stop three chapters in, my own experience, and how to protect yourself.
ADHDHypnotized by Social Media: The Feed Was Built So You’d Never Look Up
Social media feeds hold attention the way a hypnotist holds a subject: steady rhythm, no stopping point, and a reward just often enough to keep you under. The people who built them said so, and in 2026 a jury agreed.…
Book ReviewsStop Overthinking
This book gives you twenty-three techniques for breaking the rumination loop, arranged so you can find what you need at midnight without reading cover to cover. If you haven't read in this area, it's a solid starting point. If you…
FearDon’t Live in Fear: The Walls You Built and How to Get Past Them
The fence isn't in the yard. It's in the dog. The job you won't leave, the raise you won't ask for, the dream you filed under too late, you got shocked once,
Book ReviewsAn Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
A landmark memoir of living with bipolar disorder, written by a clinical psychologist who is herself one of the world's leading experts on the illness she has. That rare double perspective, patient and authority, makes it uniquely valuable: candid, beautifully…
Book ReviewsChallenger Deep
A teenager's descent into schizophrenia, told through the dual reality of a boy on a ship bound for the ocean's deepest point and the same boy in a psychiatric hospital. Inspired by Shusterman's own son's illness, it renders mental illness…
Book ReviewsThe Perks of Being a Wallflower
The freshman year of the sensitive, traumatized Charlie, navigating friendship, first love, mental illness, and a buried past, told in letters. A tender, painfully honest portrait of adolescence that became a generational touchstone. Genuinely moving, with heavy content handled with…
Book ReviewsThe Catcher in the Rye
Three days in the life of Holden Caulfield, wandering New York after being expelled, narrated in one of the most distinctive voices in American fiction. The defining novel of adolescent alienation and a touchstone of teenage disaffection, genuinely polarizing because…
Book ReviewsA Little Life
A powerful, polarizing literary novel about a damaged man whose traumatic past never releases him. Its craft achievement is total emotional immersion and a daring refusal of the healing narrative; its controversy is whether that relentlessness is profound or manipulative.…